The palaeography of Greek papyri

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THE

PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

KENYON

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK

THE

I !

PALAEOGRAPHY

' ' ll V

OF

GREEK PAPYRI

FREDERIC G. KENYON, M.A.

LATE FELLOW OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE

HON. PH.D. (hALLe), HON. D.LITT. (dURHAM)

ASSISTANT KEEPER OF MANUSCRIPTS, BRITISH MUSEUM

WITH TWENTY FACSIMILES
AND A TABLE OF ALPHABETS

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1899

PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

BY HORACE HART, M.A.
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

PREFACE

The substance of the following treatise was originally
written as a dissertation for the Conington Prize in 1897,
and I had at first intended to defer its publication for some
time, in view of the accessions of new material which the
excavations conducted each year in Egypt are continually
bringing to light. It was represented, however (and that
by one whose judgement I was bound to respect), that,
although the work might gain in absolute accuracy by
such a delay, yet its usefulness to students would be greater
if it were published now, as enabling them to assimilate
the new material for themselves. Consequently it is with-
out any idea of having reached finality, but rather as an
assistance to investigation, that this book is now offered to
the consideration of students of palaeography.

It is, in fact, an essay in the strict sense of the term — an
attempt to formularize and classify the results of a number
of discoveries, most of which have occurred quite recently.
Hence, it will be understood, the conclusions stated in it are
in many instances only the impressions of a single student
of the subject, and do not (as is the case with treatises on
the palaeography of vellum manuscripts) express the con-
sensus of opinions of many experts and many ages. The
whole subject is new; fresh materials are coming to light

vi PREFACE

year by year, and much of that which is already extant
has not been published in such a form as to make it avail-
able for students at a distance from the originals. Hence,
although the wealth of the British Museum in papyri (and
especially in literary papyri) gives a considerable advantage
to a student whose work lies in that sphere, it is possible
that the experts of Berlin and Vienna may sometimes have
been led by their experience among the yet un-photographed
documents in those collections to conclusions different from
those which are expressed in the following pages. Still,
the amount of accessible material is now so great, and
spread over such wide periods of time, that inductions may
be drawn from it with a fair amount of certainty; and
with regard to the literary papyri, which form by far the
most important branch of the subject, fortune has hitherto
brought nearly every manuscript of the first importance
to the British Museum ; so that it seems justifiable to try
to state some general results and principles to which
a study of these materials seems to lead us, in the hope
that the development of this branch of palaeographical
science may thereby be facilitated.

In conclusion I have to thank the Delegates of the
University Press for undertaking the publication of this
volume, and especially Prof. Bywater for his supervision
of it while passing through the press; and I wish also
gratefully to acknowledge the assistance of Sir E. Maunde
Thompson, K.C.B., Director of the British Museum, who
has found time to read the proof-sheets and to make many
valuable criticisms and suggestions.

F. G. K.

October 2a, 1898.

CONTENTS

CfiAP. PAOB

I. The Eahge of the Subject i

II. Papyrus as Writing Material 14

III. NoN-LITEKAaY PaPTEI 34

IV. Literary Papyri or the Ptolemaic Period .... 56
V. liTERART Papyri or the Roman Period .... 80

VI. The TRAirsrnoH to Vellum iia

Aj>peiidix I. Alphabets op Literary Papyri . . .127

ApPEHDix II. Catalogue of Lueraky Papyri . . . lag
Appendix III. The Principal Publications op Non-literary

Papyri 149

Appendix IV. Abbreviations and Symbols . . . .154

Index ■ • 'S7

PLATES

I. Letter, B.C. 242 (Bodl. MS. Gr. class, 0. ai (P;) to face page 3^

II. Petition, B.C. 161 (Brit. Mus. Pap. xMv) . . „ 39

III. Loan, B.C. 105 (Brit. Mus. Pap. ncivin) . . ,,40

IV. Official Letter, a.d. 15 (Brit. Mus. Pap. coLXXvi) . ,, 42
V. Register of poll-tax, a.d. 72-3 (Brit. Miis. Pap.

ocLx) ,, 43

VI. Receipt, a.d. 97 (Brit. Mus. Pap. oxliii) . . ,,44

VII. Receipt, a.d. 166 (Brit. Mus. Pap. cccxxxn) . „ 45

VIII. Letter, circ. a.d. 350 (Brit. Mus. Pap. coxxxvi) . „ 48

IX. Lease, 6th century (Brit. Mus. Pap. cxin. 3) . „ 50

X. Plato, Phaedo, 3rd century B.C. (Brit. Mus. Pap.

COOCLXXXVIIl) ,, 63

XI. Dialectical Fragment, early and centui-y B.C.

(Louvre Pap. a) „ 66

XII. Hyperides In Athenogenem, and century B.C.

(Louvre Pap.) , , 67

XIII. Bacchylides, ist century b.o. (Brit. Mus. Pap.

Dccxxxm) . ..... ,,76

XIV. Petition, circ. B.C. 10 (Brit. Mus. Pap. oooliv) . „ 83
XV. Homer, Odyssey III, early ist century (Brit.

Mus. Pap. ocLxxi) ,, 84

XVI. Hyperides In Demosthenem and Demosthenes,

OJi/«(ftiac II (Rossall School Library) . . ,, 86

XVII. Lease, a.d. 88 (Brit. Mus. Pap. cxii) ... ,,89

XVIII. Herodas, ist-and centuiy (Brit. Mus. Pap. oxxxv) „ 94
XIX. Homer, Iliad XIII, XIV, ist-and century (Brit.

Mus. Pap. Dccxxxii) ,, 97

XX. Homer, Miad II, and century (Bodl. MS. Gr.

class, a. 1. (P)) ...... ,, lOI

Table of alphabets to follow page laS

PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

CHAPTER I

THE EANGE OF THE SUBJECT

The science of palaeography in its application to Greek
writing upon papyrus is a development of quite recent
years. Sixty years ago, Greek palaeography practically
began with the fifth century of our era, and dealt almost
wholly with writing upon vellum and paper. Even the two
great codices which now stand at the head of the list
of Greek vellum MSS. were not at that time within the
scope of the palaeographer ; for the Codex Vaticanus was
jealously secluded in the Vatican Library, and the Codex
Sinaiticus had not yet been discovered. It is true that some Previous
examples of Greek writing upon papyrus had been known ^f t^^g"'^
since the latter part of the eighteenth century ; but these, subject,
with the exception of the charred (and only very partially
accessible) rolls from Herculaneum, did not contain literary
works, and were merely isolated documents, or groups of
documents, unconnected with one another or with the
known palaeography of vellum MSS. Shortly before the
middle of the present century, however, papyri began to be
found in Egypt in somewhat more considerable numbers,
and among them were several which contained works of

2 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

literature. The discovery of a long roll, containing three
of the lost orations of Hyperides, besides being nearly
the first example of a literary MS. on papyrus in good
preservation, was the first-fruits of the harvest of lost
authors which Egypt has yielded, and is still likely to
yield, to the explorer. Some considerable portions of
Homer were also added to the stock of available material
at about the same time. But the progress of discovery
was slow at first, and these earlier successes were not
followed for several years by much that was important
either in quantity or in quality. It is only within the
last twenty years that the stream has begun to flow
with much fullness ; and only within the last seven years,
or less, has it become possible to give anything like a
continuous record of the character and development of
Greek writing during the period when papyrus was the
material mainly in use for its reception.

The recent discoveries of papyri have, in fact, added
a province of nearly a thousand years to the domain
of the palaeographer, beginning about three hundred years
before Christ, and coming down to a limit which is best
fixed by the Arab conquest of Egypt in a.d. 640. It is
only during the last three hundred years of this period
that it overlaps the sphere occupied by vellum MSS. For
six hundred years the papyri held the field alone, and only
now are we beginning to be able to realize their character
and understand the history of their development. That
history has never yet been written with any fullness of
detail ; even the outlines of it have hardly been laid down.
When Gardthausen wrote his Griechische Paldographie, in
1879, his treatment of papyrus-palaeography was based
upon a single group of documents belonging to the second
century B.C., and two or three isolated and non-literary
pieces scattered over the centuries between that date
and the rise of vellum MSS. The great Hyperides MS.
was the principal example of a literary hand accessible to

RANGE OF THE SUBJECT

him, and of that the age was quite doubtful. His treat-
ment of the subject is, consequently, now out of date ; and
no palaeographical treatise on the same scale has been
written to take its place. The only work in which the
new material has been dealt with is Sir E. Maunde
Thompson's Handbook of Greek and Latin Palaeography
(1893), and that necessarily treats of it very briefly'.
Moreover, even since the date of that book the mass
of available material has been largely increased, and some
serious gaps in our knowledge have been filled up. Under
these circumstances, an attempt to set the material in
order, and to formulate, even if it be but provisionally,
the laws which regulated the development of Greek
writing upon papyrus, seems to be justifiable. Though
our knowledge is certainly destined to increase, and that
soon, it may be useful to mark the limits which have
hitherto been gained, and thereby to pave the way for
future progress.

The first discovery of Greek papyri in modem days was The ear-
made at Herculaneum in 1752. Before that date the only cowries of
papyri known to the palaeographer were a few survivals papyri-
from mediaeval times. Letters, papal bulls, and municipal
archives written upon papyrus in Latin existed in con-
siderable numbers, chiefly in Italy; but in Greek little
was extant at all, and that little was in extremely bad
condition^. The excavations at Herculaneum, however,
brought to light a mass of charred papyrus rolls, to which
must be assigned the honour of inaugurating the new era,
though it was forty years before these began to be made

' A still more brief survey of the subject is given by Prof. Blass in
Miiller's Handbuch der klassischen Alteriumsmssmschaftf vol. i. (1891). The
last edition of Wattenbach's AnUitung zur griechischm PaldograpMe (1895)
attempts little more than a bibliography of the subject.

=i Montfaucon, writing in 1708, says ' Graecum autem papyreum codicem
nullum hactenus vidimus' {Palaeographia Graeca, p. 15), though he sub-
sequently describes some much mutilated fragments in the library of
St. Martin at Tours, and refers to the existence of a few others at Vienna.

B a

PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

available to scholars, the first volume of facsimile texts
appearing at Naples in 1793. ^'^^^ tlien their publication
proceeded very slowly, especially during the troubled times
of the next thirty years; the Naples volumes were not
very easily accessible to scholars in general ; and the
charred condition of the rolls detracted greatly from their
value. Meanwhile a far more important mine was opened
in 1778 by the discovery in Egypt, probably in the province
of the Fayyum\ of some forty or fifty rolls of papyrus.
They were offered, by the natives who found them, to a
dealer, who bought one out of curiosity, but refused the
rest ; whereupon they were burnt by the natives for the
sake of the smell which they gave forth. The one survivor
was sent to Cardinal Stefano Borgia, and placed in his
Museum at Velletri, where it was edited by N. Schow
in 1788^. It contains nothing but a list of peasants
employed in forced labour on the embankments regu-
lating the Nile floods, and is of little importance save
as the forerunner of much more valuable discoveries.
For some time, however, discoveries came but slowly, and
the publications of the next five-and-thirty years are few
and unimportant. At last, about 1830, a new start was
made. A large group of papyri was found (again, it is
said, in an earthen pot) on the site of the Serapeum at
Memphis; and these, which are now divided between the
museums of Paris, London, Leyden, Rome, and Dresden,
form the foundation of our knowledge of the palaeography
of the second century B.C. Simultaneously papyri began

' The find was reported to have been made at Gizeh, in a buried
earthenware pot ; but since the surviving document relates to the
local affairs of the village of Ptolcmaidis Hormus, in the Fayyum, it is
much more likely to have been found in that neighbourhood. The
statements of native discoverers as to the promnance of papyri are not
valuable as evidence.

^ Charta papyracea Qraece scripta Musei Borgiani YelUris (Eome, 1788), with
specimen facsimiles. The document is of the end of the second century,
being dated (though Schow overlooked this) in the latter part of the thirty-
first year (of Commodus = A. n. 191).

RANGE OF THE SUBJECT

to appear from other sources, and the study of the materials
thus provided soon led to the publication of several volumes
of considerable note in the bibliography of papyri. In
1 83 1 Mr. W. J. Bankes acquired a papyrus roll containing
the last book of the Iliad ' — the first literary papyrus to be
discovered, with the exception of those from Herculaneum.
In 1834 the publication of the Herculaneum papyri was
resumed at Oxford. Two years later came the publication
of the Turin papyri by Amadeo Peyron; while in 1839
those of the British Museum were edited by Forshall,
and in 1843 those of Leyden by Leemans. These three
volumes contained nothing but non-literary documents;
but in the years just before and after the middle of the
century several important literary papyri came to light.
In 1 847 Mr. Arden and Mr. Harris independently obtained
portions of a great roll containing three speeches of
Hyperides ^ — the first previously unknown classical author
to be recovered on papyrus; in 1849 and 1850 Mr. Harris
obtained two portions of a MS. of the seventeenth book
of the Iliad, and another, in book form, of books ii-iv^;
in 1855 M. Mariette secured for the Louvre a fragment
of Alcman * ; in 1 856 Mr. Stobart acquired the Funeral
Oration of Hyperides^. Some small portions of Homer
were also acquired for the Louvre about the same time ^.

With these discoveries the first age of papyrus-revelation Discove-
may be said to have ended. A pause followed for twenty [^^^ " ®
years, and then a new era was inaugurated, an era of twenty
discoveries on a large scale, in which we may be said
to be still living. In 1877 an enormous mass of papyri,
mainly non-literary, was unearthed about the site of

^ Commonly refeired to as the Bankes Homer ; now Pap. oxiv in the
British Museum.

^ Now Brit. Mus. Papp. cviii and cxv.

' Now Brit. Mus. Papp. cvii and cxxti. The former (being the earlier
to be made known) is the MS. generally known as the Harris Homer.

* Louvre Pap. 70. ' Brit. Mus. Pap. xcvin.

' Louvre Pap. 3, 3 •"', 3 '"'■.

6 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Arsinoe in the Fayyum, of which the greater part went
to the collection of the Archduke Rainer at Vienna, though
Paris, London, Oxford, and Berlin also had a share.

The papyri of this first Fayyum find were almost entirely
of the Byzantine period, and for the most part were very
fragmentary. Since that date, though papyri have also
come from EshmunSn (Hermopolis), the neighbourhood of
Thebes, and elsewhere, the mounds of the Fayyum have
been the most prolific source of papyri, nearly all, however,
up to the present, having been of a non-literary character.
About 1892 another very large find was made in the same
district, principally, it would appear, from the site of
a village called Socnopaei Nesus ; and this time the lion's
share fell to Berlin, although the British Museum secured
a good representative selection, and others went to Vienna
and Geneva. This second great find differed from the first
in containing far more perfect documents, and in belonging
mainly to the Roman period, from the beginning of the
first to the middle of the third century after Christ.
Meanwhile the range of our knowledge had been extended
backwards by Mr. Flinders Petrie's discovery (in 1889-90)
of a number of mummy-coffins, the cartonnages of which
wejre composed of fragments of papyri written in the third
century B. c. Most of these were business documents ; but
the literary specimens included two very valuable items
in the fragments of Plato's Phaedo and the lost Antiope
of Euripides. About the same time the British Museum
acquired a most remarkable series of literary papyri, in-
cluding the lost 'Adriva'mv UoXinia of Aristotle, the Mimes
of Herodas, part of another oration of Hyperides, and
a long medical treatise, to say nothing of MSS. of
Homer, Demosthenes, and Isocrates. To these the Louvre
added in 1893 the greater part of Hyperides' masterpiece,
the Oration againd Athenogencs. In the same year a gap
in the chronological sequence of dated papyri was filled
by the acquisition on the part of the British Museum

RANGE OF THE SUBJECT

and the Geneva Library of a group of documents from
the middle of the fourth century (the correspondence of
a Roman officer named Abinnaeus); while the papyri
obtained by Messrs. Grenfell and Hogarth in the years
1894-1896 have provided ample material for the palaeo-
graphy of the latter half of the second century B. c, and
have even extended our knowledge for some distance into
the previously blank first century B.C. The winter of
1896-7, however, threw into the shade all previous dis-
coveries, with the possible exception of those of 1890-1.
The British Museum acquired a papyrus containing con-
siderable portions of the odes of Bacchylides; M. Nicole,
of Geneva, secured some fragments, small but interesting,
of a comedy by Menander; while Messrs. Grenfell and
Hunt, excavating at Behnesa (Oxyrhynchus) on behalf of
the Egypt Exploration Fund, unearthed masses of papyri
which rival in quantity, and far surpass in quality, even
the great finds of Arsinoe and Socnopaei Nesus. The
thousands of papyri discovered on this occasion include,
along with masses of fragments, large numbers of non-
literary rolls in excellent condition; and, more valuable
but more tantalizing, scores of fragments of literary works,
known and unknown. The full list of these discoveries
has not yet been made public, but it includes the now
famous ' Logia ' of our Lord, and fragments of St. Matthew,
Sappho (probably), Thucydides, Sophocles, Plato, and other
authors, besides the inevitable Homer. It may safely be
predicted that the harvest of that season will not be
surpassed for many a year to come.

The general result, from the palaeographical point of Chrono-
view, of this series of discoveries, and especially of those jutribu-
of the last six years, is that we now have an almost un- ^'^^JJ.j^""'
interrupted series of dated documents from B.C. 270 to
A.D. 680. The third and second centuries B.C. are now
so fully represented that there seems little room for
serious error in dealing with MSS. of these periods. For

PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

the first century, especially the transition from Ptolemaic
to Roman writing, material was until two years ago almost
wholly wanting, and still is but scanty. From the beginning
of the Christian era the supply begins to grow plentiful
again, and from about the middle of the first century until
the second quarter of the third century dated papyri exist
in such numbers that hardly a year is without many of
them. The last half of the third century is somewhat
thinly represented; but the age of Diocletian (a turning-
point in the history of palaeography) is covered by some
recent acquisitions of Mr. Grenfell's (now in the British
Museum), and the middle of the fourth century is fully
known from the papyri of Abinnaeus at London and
Geneva, to which reference has been made above. A few
documents dated about the year 400 have lately come to
light, but the fifth century is now the darkest period in
the palaeography of papyri. The sixth century and the
first half of the seventh, on the other hand, have yielded
a huge harvest; but the proportion of precisely dated
documents is small, and the accurate apportionment of
the various types of hands cannot be made with absolute
certainty. With the Arab conquest of Egypt the practice
of Greek writing on papyrus received its death-blow, and
during the latter half of the seventh century it slowly
flickered out. No dated document of the eighth century is
in existence, except two tiny receipts in Arabic and Greek,
though one long papyrus is assigned with apparently good
reason to this period.
Inferences The end of the papyrus period is, therefore, fixed and
use of "^ known ; but with the beginning it is diflferent. Recognizing
■writing, that the material which we have from the early part of the
third century B.C. is sufficiently plentiful to allow us to
carry our inferences back for a generation or two, we may
fairly say that we know how men wrote in the days of
Aristotle and Menander; but we have not yet got back
to Pindar and Aeschylus, much less to Homer or (if a less

RANGE OF THE SUBJECT

contentious name be preferred) Hesiod. There are, however,
certain broad generalizations and inferences which have
a bearing even upon these distant periods. In the first
place it is clear that, at the point where our knowledge
now begins, writing was a well established art, practised
not only by literarj' men and professional scribes, but by
soldiers, farmers, and working men and women of all sorts.
It was used for the daily affairs of life, to all appearance,
not less than it was in England a century ago. It could
be written with ease and elegance ; it could also be written
with a speed and fluency, which, if they sometimes offer
serious difficulties to the decipherer, prove at least that the
writer handled a ready pen. From this it is clear that it
was no newly acquired art, but had already a long history
behind it; how long, we have at present no sufficient
evidence to say, but there is no sort of reason to be chary
of generations. Further, it is obvious that the writing on
papyrus bears no recognizable relation to contemporary
inscriptions upon stone ; and therefore care is necessary in
using epigraphic evidence to determine the style of writing
in the preceding centuries. The characters used in inscrip-
tions may resemble the formal writing (or printing) of the
same age ; but they have no more bearing on the running
hands in common use than modern tombstones have on the
handwriting of to-day. Men may have carved formally and
with difficulty upon stone ; it does not follow that they
did not write upon papyrus with ease and fluency.

So far we have made no formal distinction between Distinc-
literary and non-literary papyri ; yet" the distinction is between
fundamental for the study of papyrus-palaeography. It literary
is a distinction that runs through the whole period of nterary
which we are speaking. Papyri which were meant to ^'ritings.
be books were written in quite different hands from the
papyri which were meant to be documents, whether official
or private. The difference is, in many cases, as marked
as that between writing and print at the present day;

lo PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

and the development must be followed separately along
each line. A parallel may be found in the distinction
between the book -hands and the charter-hands of the
Middle Ages. The charters of the twelfth century may
bear some likeness, recognizable by the trained eye, to the
books of the same period; but from the thirteenth to
the fifteenth centuries the relationship is practically indis-
tinguishable, and a person who can date a charter of
Edward III or Henry VII with certainty may be quite at
sea with a chronicle or Bible of the same age. So with
papyri, an acquaintance with the succession of non-literary
hands only goes a little way towards enabling one to
fix the date of a literary MS. And there is this further
complication to be borne in mind, that whereas the
charter-hand of the Middle Ages is the hand of a trained
scribe just as much as the book-hand, the non-literary hand
of the papyri includes the writings of private individuals,
often very imperfectly acquainted with the use of the
pen, as well as those of official clerks. We have, in fact,
during the papyrus period what we have hardly at all
in the vellum period of palaeography, the casual every-day
writings of the common people; and consequently the
lines of classification which serve for vellum MSS. do not
apply. For this reason the palaeography of papyri forms
a branch apart, the principles of which must be stated
independently.

Greek writing upon vellum can be classified in two
broad and well-defined divisions, as uncial or minuscule,
the former being the earlier, the latter the later style, —
of course with some period of overlapping. Uncial writing
is never cursive, whereas minuscules are so commonly
connected by ligatures that the terms minuscule and cursive
are habitually used as synonymous, though they are not
properly so. In papyri the circumstances are quite difierent.
It is impossible to draw any distinction between uncial
and minuscule ; and uncials, no less than minuscules, may

RANGE OF THE SUBJECT ii

be written cursively. An uncial hand without ligatures is
not necessarily earlier than one which has them ; and, for
non-literary purposes, hands of the most cursive character
are found in the very earliest papyri yet discovered. The
only classification which is of use in the study of papyri
is that which has been stated above, into literary and
non-literary hands ; and it will be necessary, in the present
treatment of the subject, to deal with them separately.

The material for the examination of these two branches
is, however, of very difierent character. It is of the nature
of a business document, such as a lease, a loan, or a receipt,
that it should be accurately dated ; it is only rarely that
a literary work will have any precise indication of the
same kind. The long series of dated documents, spoken
of in the preceding pages, consists almost exclusively of
non-Kterary hands. Consequently our knowledge of non- Non-liter-
literary palaeography is far more exact than that which we graphy
have of literary papyri. A non-literary document must '^ss im-
be written in a strange hand indeed if the doubts as to tut better
its period range over a hundred years, while those which ^^„°^"
are written in anything like the hand of a trained clerk literary.
can generally be placed approximately within the limits
of a generation. But the dates assigned to literary MSS.
have fluctuated over several centuries, and cannot even
now be fixed with absolute precision. Yet it is just
of these MSS. that it is most important to know
the age. The precise date of a petition from the fellah
Sarapion to the magistrate Hierax is a matter which
concerns a few specialists alone ; but the date of a MS.
of Hyperides interests Greek scholars in general, and
that of a copy of a Gospel, if one should be discovered,
would be a matter of the gravest importance to theologians.
The main object of the present essay is, consequently, to
show how far science has progressed in this department;
to examine the whole series of extant literary papyri ; to
show which can be dated accurately, and what are the

12 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

probable dates of those which are still in doubt. Such an
examination will have to deal with the subject practically
de novo ; and it is hoped that this may be done without
the smallest appearance of disrespect for the eminent
scholars and palaeographers who have previously assigned
dates to the extant MSS. It is a case in which an access
of fresh material justifies a new comer in revising the
work of his betters; and the purpose of the following
pages is rather to show where new facts have come to
light than to add to the number of conjectural dicta.
Necessity Jn spite of the line which has been drawn between
ing both, literary and non-literary papyri, it will not be possible
to ignore the latter altogether in a study of the former.
In the first place, the non-literary documents furnish us
with certain broad criteria which are applicable to the
literary documents. The main division, which will be
made below, into Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine periods,
though more noticeable in the non-literary hands, is trace-
able also with the literary; and certain forms of letters
are common to both. But in addition to this the evidence
on which literary papyri are dated not unf requently depends
on our knowledge of non-literary palaeography. Titles,
scholia, and corrections to a literary MS. are often written
in non-literary hands, and so supply at least a terminus
ante quern for the document in which they are found.
In other cases, one side of the papyrus may contain literary
writing, the other non-literary ; a knowledge of the manner
in which papyrus rolls were made and written determines
which of these writings is the earlier, and a knowledge
of non-literary palaeography gives us a date to guide us
in estimating the age of the more valuable writing.

On all these grounds, then, it has seemed advisable not
to limit this essay to the palaeography of literai'y papyri,
but to include in it a sketch of non-literary writing as
well. The latter will come first, because it is better
known, and because the results of it are required for the

RANGE OF THE SUBJECT 13

examination of the less-known branch of the subject ; but,
both because it is better known and because it is less
important, it may be treated more briefly. The more
important literary papyri, on the other hand, will need
individual examination; even small scraps of writing
of this type have been noted as far as possible, since
they will sometimes be found to throw valuable light
upon the subject. But before proceeding to the palaeo-
graphy, strictly so called, of papyri, it will be necessary
to give some account of papyrus as a material for writing
on, — the Buchivesen of the papyrus period, if a German
word may be used where there is no exact equivalent in
English. It will not be necessary to treat of this ex-
haustively, since it would be useless to reproduce what
is already accessible in the recognized handbooks of the
subject ; but it will be useful to summarize what has been
previously known, and to add the further information which
is now available. Until recently, our knowledge of the
subject has been almost entirely derived from the statements
of ancient authors; but we are now able to test and
interpret these by an examination of the extant papyrus
MSS. which the sands of Egypt have restored to us.

CHAPTER II

PAPYRUS AS WEITlNa MATERIAL

3iaily use The use of papyrus in Egypt, the country of its production,
In e'^^'V^ goes back to an indefinite antiquity. The earliest extant
specimen is a papyrus containing accounts of the reign
of king Assa, whose date, according to a moderate estimate
of Egyptian chronology, is about 3580-3536 b. c.^ ; while
the earliest literary work which has come down to us (the
Prisse Papyrus at Paris), although the copy which we have
of it seems to have been written between 3700 and 2500 B.C.,
is stated to have been composed (and therefore originally
written down) in the same reign. In technical execution
the papyrus rolls of the Egyptian kingdom leave nothing
to be desired, and there is no reason to suppose that the
manner in which the material was prepared diifered at all
from that of Greek and Roman days. We have, however,
to pass over a period of some three thousand years before
reaching a date at which we can be sure that papyrus was
in use among the Greeks. The statement of Herodotus ^
that the lonians still applied the name of hi^depai to books
made of papyrus, because they had formerly used skins
as writing material, shows at least that in his time the
Greeks of Asia used papyrus, and that its use was not
quite a new thing. It is safe, therefore, to assert that
it was the writing material of the Greeks at the beginning
of the fifth century; but how much further it can be

' Petrie, History of Egypt, i. 81. ° Herod, v. 58.

PAPYRUS AS WRITING MATERIAL 15

carried back must remain doubtful. Formerly it was
held that the exclusiveness of the Egyptians in the matter
of foreign trade made it inadmissible to argue from the
practice of Egypt to that of Greece; but the proofs of
intercommunication have now increased so greatly that
this argument has lost force, and we must be prepared for
the possible appearance of evidence establishing the use
of papyrus by the Greeks at a much earlier period than
has hitherto been held probable.

With regard to the manner in which the writing material Prepara-
was prepared from the plant, and the methods of writing material.
upon it, not much has to be added to what has long been
known on the subject and may be found in the recognized
authorities, notably Birt, Gardthausen, and Thompson.
The locus classicus on the preparation of the material is
a well-known passage in the elder Pliny (iV. IL xiii.
1 1 -1 3), the interpretation of which must be guided by the
conclusions derivable from the papyrus documents actually
in existence. The pith of the stem of the papyrus plant
was cut into thin strips, the width of which was of course
determined by the thickness of the stem, while their length
varied considerably, as will be shown below. These strips
(Lat. philyrae) were laid side by side to form a sheet.
Each sheet was composed of two layers, in the one of which
the strips ran horizontally, while in the other they were
perpendicular. The layers were attached to one another
by glue, moistened with water, — preferably, it would appear,
the turbid water of the Nile, which was supposed to add
strength to the glue \ The sheets thus made were pressed,
dried in the sun, and polished, so as to remove unevenness
in the surface ; and they were then fit for use.

' It is almost certain that this is the true sense of Pliny's 'turbidus
liquor vim glutinis praebet,' as held by Birt and Thompson. Apart from
the inherent improbability of the Nile water being able by itself to act as
glue, it may be added that traces of glue are visible in extant papyri.
The amount used was, no doubt, very small, so as to avoid affecting the
surface of the papyrus.

i6 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Size of the The size of the sheets (KoXX^juara) varied according to the
quahty of the papyrus, only one rule being constant, that
the height is greater than the breadth, when the sheet
is held in the way in which it is meant to be used. Pliny
[L c.) gives the dimensions of the different qualities known
in his time, and his figures were formerly supposed to
apply to the height of the papyrus. This view is, however,
invalidated by the testimony of the extant papyri, and
Birt is no doubt right in referring Pliny's measurements to
the width. The largest size named by Pliny (which was also
the most valuable) is 13 digiti, or about gl inches; but
papyri are extant which are as tall as 154 inches, and
from 10 to 13 is quite common in documents which make
no pretence of special handsomeness or excellence. Further,
we do not find that poor people necessarily use papyrus
of very small height ; while it is true that narrow sheets
are often used for comparatively unimportant purposes.
Thus, to quote cases in which only a single sheet is required
for a document, the two most elaborately written petitions
in the British Museum (Papp. CCCLIV and CLXxvii), which
are addressed to the highest official in Egypt, measure
respectively 8| and 6 J inches in width; while receipts,
records of loans, and the like, are very commonly written
on papyrus not more than three inches wide. An examina-
tion, moreover, of such long rolls as are at present known
tends to confirm Birt's view that Pliny's dimensions refer
to the width of the Kokkruxara. The finest literary papyrus
in existence, the British Museum Odyssey (Pap. cclxxi)
has KoWrifxara of just over 9 inches in width ; while in the
Bacchylides papyrus, which is likewise a handsome roll,
they vary between 8 and 9 inches. In the Herodas MS.,
which is small in height and unostentatiously written, they
are only 6 inches in width. The papyrus of Hyperides In
Philippidem and Demosthenes' Third Epistle, which is only
9 J inches in height, has KoWrnxara 7 i inches wide ; while
in a tax-register (Brit. Mus. Pap. ccLXviii), which reaches

PAPYRUS AS WRITING MATERIAL 17

the extraordinary height of 15^ inches, they are only 5
inches wide. The papyrus of the 'Adr^valoiv UoXirela, which
was originally intended merely for a farm-bailifFs accounts,
has KoAA,J7/iiara of 5 to 5^ inches in width ; and this is a very
common size for non-literary documents.

For non-literary documents, such as letters, receipts,
deeds of sale or lease, contracts, petitions, and the like, single
sheets of papyrus could often be used; but for literary
purposes a number of sheets were united to form a roll.
According to the ordinary interpretation of Pliny's words,
not more than twenty sheets went to a roll ; but this
statement is not confirmed by the extant papyri. Twenty Forma-
sheets of even the widest kind (9^ inches each, as stated in ^.^^g ^f
the last paragraph) would only give a roll of 16 feet; and papyrus,
this length was certainly often exceeded. Egyptian papyri
sometimes run to enormous lengths, in one case to as much
as 144 feet; but these need not be taken into account.
They were for show rather than for use, — editions de luxe
which the owner proposed to take with him to the next
world, where he might have strength to grapple with them,
but which he certainly did not want to read on earth.
But even Greek papyri, though they do not approach these
dimensions, often exceed the limit which the text of Pliny
appears to assign to them. From 20 to 30 feet may be Their
taken as a full size, the higher limit being rarely, if ever, "'^^ '
exceeded ^ The largest papyrus of Hyperides (Brit. Mus.
Papp. cviii, cxv), containing the orations against Demo-
sthenes and in defence of Lycophron and Euxenippus,
must have measured, when complete, about 28 feet ; a MS.
of the last two books of the Iliad (Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxvni),
about 25 feet; and that of the Mimes of Herodas (Brit.
Mus. Pap. cxxxv) perhaps about the same. On the other

' The papyrus containing the Revenue Laws of Ptolemy Philadelphus,
obtained by Mr. Petrie and now in the Bodleian, measures 4a feet ; but
this is composed of several distinct documents attached to one another,
and, moreover, is not a literary work.

C

i8 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

hand, a papyrus containing the De Pace of Isocrates (Brit.
Mus. Pap. cxxxit) measures 14 feet; while that of Hyperides
In Athenogenem cannot have measured, when complete, more
than about 7 feet. The true interpretation of Pliny's state-
ment, no doubt, is that in practice the sellers of papyrus
kept and sold it in lengths (Pliny's scapi) consisting of twenty
sheets. Egyptian rolls have been observed in which the
number 30 is marked at the end of each twentieth Ko'AArjjua,
and this no doubt indicates the end of each length of papyrus
as purchased by the author from the stationer ^ But the
author was no more limited by this fact than the modern
writer is limited by the fact that he purchases his foolscap
by the quire or the packet. He could join one length of
papyrus on to another, and when he had jfinished his work he
could cut off whatever papyrus was left blank. It is not in
the least probable a priori that there was any hard and fast
rule fixing the length of a papyrus book, nor do the facts
disclosed by the extant MSS. authorize such a supposition.
Their The height of a papyrus varies considerably, but the
average may be taken to be from 9 to 11 inches. The
tallest at present known is a tax-register in the British
Museum (Pap. cclxviii), which measures i^^ inches. Three
census rolls (Papp. cCLVii-ccLix) measure 134 inches; and
about II inches is quite a common height. Literary
MSS. are generally rather smaller. Of those mentioned
above, the principal Hyperides MS. measures la inches,
the Isocrates 11 inches, the Homer 9I inches; while
the Herodas (which must be regarded as a kind of
pocket volume, such as volumes of poetry often are in
modern times) is only 5 inches in height. The Louvre
Hyperides measures 9 inches, the British Museum MS.
of the same author's Oration againut Philippides 9^
inches; while the two most handsome literary papyri
now extant, the British Museum Odyssey and Bacchylides,

' See Borehardfc, Zdtschrift fur dgyptische Sprache xxvii. 120, Wilcken,
Sermes, xxviii. 167.

PAPYRUS AS WRITING MATERIAL 19

measure respectively 13 and 9I inches. To give the oldest
extant examples, the Petrie Phaedo measures 8^ inches in
height, and the Antiope 8^ inches.

The writing was normally on that side of the papyrus Recto and
on which the fibres lay horizontally (technically known ^^"'''
as the recto) ; and this is a rule of much importance ; for
when, as is frequently the case, a papyrus has been used
on both sides, it is often only by this rule that it can be
determined which writing is the earher. It is therefore
necessary to state the law somewhat precisely, following
Wilcken, to whom the first formulation of it is due ^. It
is obvious on reflection that, by holding the papyrus
differently, the fibres on either side can be made to lie
horizontally, only in one case they are parallel to the
height of the roll, and in the other to its length; but it
does not follow that either side can be made the true recto
at will. The true recto of the original sheets of papyrus
out of which a roll is made is that side on which the
shorter fibres are (probably because greater perfection and -
evenness could be secured with short fibres than with long
ones) ; and the right way of holding such a sheet is to make
these fibres lie horizontally (since thus the least obstacle
is offered to the pen). Hence, when several such sheets
are joined together, side by side, into a roll, all the fibres
on the side which is primarily intended for writing will lie
horizontally ; and, conversely, the side of a roll on which
the fibres run in the direction of the length of the roll is
that which is primarily intended for writing. If writing
is found running at right angles to the fibres, one of two
things must have happened : either the scribe has written
on the verso of the papyrus, or he is holding the recto in an
unusual way. Examples of both are found. The verso
is used when the recto already has writing upon it, or,
occasionally, in the Ptolemaic period, without obvious cause ;

' 'Recto Oder Verso,' in Hermes, xxii. (1887).

c a

20 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

never, so far as present experience goes, in Roman times,
unless the recto has been previously used. Writing on the
recto, but at right angles to the fibres, is found in a few-
Ptolemaic documents and in many of the Byzantine period.
In the former cases the roll has been made up in an unusual
manner, the sheets being joined together top and bottom,
instead of side by side ; so that the writing, though it is
across the fibres, still runs parallel to the length of the roll.
In the Byzantine documents, on the other hand, the roll is
made in the ordinary way, and the writing runs parallel to
the height of the roll, so that in reading the roll has to be
unfolded from the top downwards, instead of sideways.
This method is not applied, however, to works of literature.
The general rule, — invariable in the case of literary
works, apparently invariable in non-literary works of the
Roman period, and largely predominating in non-literary
works of the Ptolemaic period, — is that the first writing
on the papyrus is parallel to the fibres. The exceptions
■ can easily be recognized after a little experience, — in the
ease of large papyri, by looking for the traces of the
original sheets, and in the case of small scraps by noticing
the greater smoothness of the true recto. It is rare to
find a work continued from the recto to the verso. A long
book of magical formulae (Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxi) and an
account book (Pap. cclxti) are examples of this practice ;
but ordinarily if there is writing on the verso it is quite
independent of that on the recto. It may safely be assumed
that no MS. of a literary work intended for sale
was ever written on the verso; though copies for private
use might be, as in the case of the 'AdrivaCuiv IToXireia of
Aristotle. In a long medical papyrus in the British
Museum (Pap. cxxxvti), and in the Revenue Papyrus of
Philadelphus, notes or additions to the main work are
written on the verso; but neither of these is a literary
work intended for sale.
Width of The normal method of arranging the writing on a

PAPYRUS AS WRITING MATERIAL 21

papyrus roll was in columns, the lines of which run
parallel to the length of the roll, as above described.
For literary MSS. this method is invariable ; the Byzantine
documents mentioned above, in which the writing ran in
one large column down the whole papyrus, in lines at
right angles to its length, are of a non-literary character,
generally wills or leases. The width of these columns
((TeAiSes) varied, but for literary MSS. intended for sale
the length of a hexameter line may be taken as determining
the extreme width. This, in a hand of good size, implies
a width of about 5 inches, besides the margins, which
might be as much as ij inches between the columns and
2 or 3 inches at the top and bottom ^. In pi'ose works,
so far as our present knowledge goes, the width of the
columns is generally much less. The widest are found
in the Louvre papyrus of Hyperides, which measure about
3^ inches ; the narrowest in one of the British Museum
papyri of the same author (the In PhilippideTti), which
are barely half that width (if inches). The large
Hyperides papyrus has columns 2 inches wide, while
those of the British Museum Isocrates measure a little
less than 3 inches. The only literary papyrus in which
these dimensions are exceeded is that of Aristotle's
' A.dr]va(.u)v IToXireta, which has one column measuring as
much as II inches wide, while several others are 5 or
6 inches; but this does not constitute a real exception,
since the MS. is not written in a literary hand, nor
intended for publication^. In non-literary papyri much

' These are the measurements in the British Museum papyrus fragment
of the Odyssey (Pap. colxxx';, which may be regarded as the handsomest
literary papyrus at present extant. In another well-written Homer MS.
(Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxvni) the figures are slightly less.

" It has sometimes been supposed that the <r(\idfs correspond with the
KoWiiiiaTa, that is, that the writing was not allowed to cross the junctions
between the sheets of which the papyrus roll was composed ; but this
is not borne out by the facts. In the best-written MSS. (such as the
British Museum Odyssey and Bacchylides), no less than in the worst,
the writing frequently crosses the junctions.

22 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

greater widths are sometimes found, their dimensions
being in fact determined by their contents. In census-
lists and some kinds of accounts the scribe preferred to
get each entry into a single line; hence in a document
of the former class (Brit. Mus. Pap. cclx) some of the
columns are lo inches in width, while in a tax-register
(Pap. cxix) they are as much as la and 13 inches.
Ptolemaic scribes had a fondness for writing such things
as wills, leases, loans, and the like, in one or two very
broad columns. To give two instances only, Brit. Mus.
Pap. DCLXXV is written in a single column measuring
15 inches in width and only 6 inches in height; while
Pap. Dcxxiii is in two columns of 13 inches, besides
a short abstract of the contents in a separate column.
These, however, are only examples of a temporary fashion,
which must have been found inconvenient in practical use,
and could never have been adopted for any composition
which was likely to be often read.
Titles. The mutilation of nearly every literary papyrus which
has come down to us renders it difBcult to lay down any
veiy certain rule as to the methods commonly employed
by the ancients to indicate the contents of a roll. It was
certainly not unusual to inscribe the title of a work at
the end of it, as is the case with the largest Hyperides
MS., the British Museum Isocrates, and several of the
papyri of Homer; but it was not invariably done, for it
is not found in the MS. of the In Philippidem, the end
of which is perfect, nor yet in the Aristotle papyrus. It
is also obvious that it would have been extremely incon-
venient to have to unroll the whole of a volume in order
to see what its contents were. It was usual to leave a
blank column at the beginning of a roll, as is found in the
papyri of Aristotle and Herodas and in the Harris Homer ;
but in none of these cases is the title written on it; and
in the great Hyperides MS., where the title was so written,
it is by a different and apparently later hand. It seems

PAPYRUS AS WRITING MATERIAL 23

certain, therefore, that the ordinary way of indicating the
title of a work was by the aCkXvlios, or little strip of papyrus
or vellum attached to and projecting from the roll; and
these, though known from the references in ancient
authors to have existed \ have in no case come down to us.

In all palaeographical works it is stated that the roll, Use of
when completed, was rolled on a stick (o/x^aXo's), ornamented '^°^^^'-'^-
at the ends with projecting knobs or tips (/ce'para); and
the statements of Latin writers ^ leave no doubt that this
was the habitual practice in the case of their works.
The actual papyri which have come to light of recent
years make it necessary to modify this proposition. In
no case (except in dummy rolls manufactured for sale to
tourists) has a wooden roller been found; many of the
Herculaneum papyri had a central core of papyrus ; some
burnt rolls brought from Egypt a few years ago had, in
some instances, a reed or quill in the middle ; but as a rule
there is no trace of any roller at all. This fact is perfectly
intelligible in itself, and may quite well be reconciled with
the statements of the Latin poets. Papyrus was not
originally the brittle material which, from its appearance
after the lapse of a score or so of centuries, one is apt to
imagine, and could quite easily be rolled upon itself; and
for this purpose, as well as to resist tearing, the ends of
the roll are often stiffened by an extra thickness of papyrus,
about an inch in breadth ^- In the case of common copies
this was, no doubt, the regular practice; while the
handsomer books would be provided with wooden rollers
and all the other appurtenances of style and luxury. The
distinction would be very much the same as that between
cloth-bound and paper-covered copies at the present day.
The Latin poets are speaking of the dainty copies of their
works which were to be seen in the bookshops and salons

' Thompson, Greek and Latin, Palaeography, p. 57. ' lb- p. 56-

= A good instance may be found in the Harris Homer (Brit. Mus.
Pap. cvii).

codices,

24 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

of the capital ; while the papyri which have come down
to us are generally from the houses and tombs of obscure
provincials in Upper and Middle Egypt.

On the further details of book production in the papyrus
period there is nothing new to be recorded. The allusions
in the Latin poets provide us with all we know as to
the (paivokrjs, or wrapper, with which the roll might be
covered, the cedar-oil by which it might be protected
against insects, the chest (resembling a bucket, to judge
from extant representations) in which it was kept. These
details have already been gathered together in the recognized
handbooks of palaeography, and it seems useless to repeat
them here. 'The discoveries of actual papyrus rolls have
added nothing to our knowledge on such points.

Papyrus The description of a papyrus book, which has been
given in the preceding pages, applies to nearly the whole
of the papyrus period, as at present known. But towards
the end of the period the codex, or modem book form,
is found coming into existence side by side with the
traditional roll form. The origin of the codex is, no
doubt, to be found in the sets of wax tablets which were
in use for note-books at least as far back as the first
century B.C., and probably much earlier. These tablets,
consisting of wax laid upon wood and surrounded by
raised wooden rims, were bound together by strings or
leather bands passing through holes bored in the rim
of one of the longer sides of each tablet, so as to form
something in the shape of a modern book. It was not
until several centuries later, however, that this shape
was adopted for literary compositions. As Sir E. Thompson
has pointed out^ the cause of the final victory of this
form was that it was possible to include so much more
matter in a codex than in a roll; and the requirements
of the churchmen and the lawyers agreed in giving it

' Greek and Latin Palaeography, p, 61,

PAPYRUS AS WRITING MATERIAL 25

the preference. A single Gospel was as much as a papyrus
roll could contain, while a vellum codex could include
the entire Bible; and the great legal collections of the
reign of Justinian would have needed a whole library
of rolls. For a short time the experiment was tried of
making papyrus codices, the papyrus being cut up into
leaves and fastened together by strings or leather bands.
It does not appear, however, that the experiment gave
satisfaction, for very few instances of such papyrus books
have come down to us. A MS. of the second, third,
and fourth books of the Iliad, formerly assigned to the
fifth century, but, for reasons which will be given sub-
sequently, more probably belonging to the third (Brit.
Mus. Pap. cxxvi) ; a page of Menander at Geneva,
probably of somcAvhat later date; the Berlin fragments
of the 'A6r)va(a)v UoXiTfCa, probably of the fourth century ;
a copy of the prophet Zechariah, of the sixth or seventh
century, exhibited at the London Oriental Congress in 1892,
and last seen in a dealer's shop in Vienna; some leaves
of a Psalter of the same date, in the British Museum (Pap.
xxxvi) ; small portions of two Hesiod MSS. at Paris and
Vienna, of the fourth or fifth century ; a magical papyrus
in the British Museum (Pap. xlvi), and another in the
Bibliotheque Nationale (MS. Suppl. grec. 574), both of the
fourth century ; these are the principal examples of Greek
papyrus codices at present known to exist. There are
Coptic volumes of this kind of much greater size, resembling
the large vellum quartos and folios, but there is no sign
that these were ever adopted for Greek literature. The
rise of the codex was accompanied by the rise of vellum,
and the papyrus period, so far as Greek literary works
are concerned, was then coming to an end.

Before beginning the history of Greek writing on '^^^^^^'
papyrus, and of the evolution of the written characters ings, and
individually, it will be as well to dispose of some subsidiary ^t°ps-

26 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

matters, such as punctuation, accentuation, and the use
of breathings. In all these respects papyrus MSS. are
in a very elementary stage. None has a full equipment
of stops, accents, and breathings; many have none at all.
Further, the use of them does not follow regular laws
of development; or rather, the materials now available
do not allow us to ascertain any law. The probability
is that, the higher the quality of a MS., the fuller is
its equipment in these subsidiary guides to intelligence.
Non-literary MSS. very rarely have any of them.
Accents are not found in them at all; breathings in
extreme rarity; and only a few have some show of
division of sentences. In the lower classes of literary
MSS. an occasional accent is found, probably when there
was some likelihood of a mistake as to the meaning of
a word; breathings are equally rare; and only important
breaks in the sense are indicated by punctuation-marks
or blank spaces. Of the highest class of MSS., those
which were intended for sale or for preservation in large
libraries, there are very few extant specimens; but
there is some indication that accents, breathings, and
punctuation-marks were more freely used in them, though
without any approach to the completeness of later usage.
Separation The most elementary form of assistance to the reader
consists of the separation of words from one another.
Where this exists, it is not usually very difficult to deter-
mine for oneself the pauses in the sense. But, perhaps
because it is so elementary, it is the last form of assistance
to be given in Greek MSS. There is sometimes an
approximation to it in non-literary papyri, where, the
text being written cursively, the writer not unnaturally
lifts his pen oftener at the end of a word than elsewhere ;
but this is so irregular and incomplete as to furnish very
little help. In literary papyri the separation of words
is almost wholly wanting; perhaps the only example of
it is in a short grammatical treatise, bearing the name

PAPYRUS AS WRITING MATERIAL 27

of Tryphon, written not earlier than the fourth century
on some blank pages in a MS. of Homer in the
British Museum (Pap. cxxYi). In other MSS. the nearest
approach to such a practice is the use of a dot, above
the line, to indicate the true word-division in cases where
the reader might easily make a mistake at first sight.
Thus Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxvi gives, in Homer, II. iii. 379,
h^r • empovcre ^ : and a similar system is found in the Mar-
seilles papyrus of Isocrates. It is however rare, the dot, if
used at all, being generally required to separate sentences
rather than words. A comma below the line is also found
occasionally for this purpose (e. g. Bacch. xvii. 102).

Punctuation in the ordinary sense of the word, or the Punctua-
indication of a break in the sense, is more common, though
still only sporadic. The earliest system would seem to be
that of leaving a slight space in the text, and placing a short
horizontal stroke {Trapdypa(j>os, more rarely irapaypa^)-/!) below
the beginning of the line in which the break occurs 2. This
use of the TTapdypa(j)os is mentioned by Aristotle ^ and is
found in some 9f the earliest extant papyri. Thus in the
fragment of the Antiope among the Petrie papyri (third
century B. c.) it is used to indicate the end of each actor's
speech ; and similarly, along with the double dots mentioned
below, in the Petrie Phaedo fragment. It is found also
in the Louvre Hyperides (second century B. c), the British
Museum MSS. of the same author (first century b. c. and
first century after Christ), the Herodas (first or second
century), and in several other MSS. In the Bacchylides
MS. (first century B. c.) it marks the end of each strophe,
antistrophe, and epode. Mistakes are sometimes made
by transcribers in placing the 'napaypa(\>os, but its proper
place is below the line in which the pause occurs. It
marks the end, not the beginning, of a sentence.

1 Classical Texts from Papyri in the British Museum, p. 82.

2 Spaces in the text, -without paragraphi, are found in some literary papyri
(e. g. the Herodas MS. sometimes), and not unfrequently in non-literary
papyri, especially those of a legal nature. = Shet 3. 8. 1409 a. 20.

28 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

The use of dots for the same purpose is equally old. In the
Petrie Phaedo, which is of the same age as the Antiope, and
in the Vienna papyrus containing the ' Curse of Artemisia,'
which may be older, a double dot resembling a colon is
used to separate sentences. This occurs also in the Erotic
Fragment found and published by Mr. Grenfell (now Pap.
Bcv in the British Museum), which is of the second century
B. c. ; but it is not common. The single dot, generally placed
well above the line, is common. It is used freely, and
almost regularly, in the Bacchylides papyrus, occasionally
in the British Museum Odyssey MS. (Pap. coLXxi); and
it has been added by later hands to the three earliest
papyri of the ILiad in the British Museum (Papp. cvii, cxiv,
cxxviii). The use of the dot is known to have been
systematized by the Alexandrian critics (traditionally by
Aristophanes of Byzantium), and different values were
assigned to it according as it stood above the line (a full
stop), in the middle of the line (a comma), or on the line
(a semicolon); but this system cannot be traced in the
extant papyri, where the dot is generally above the line
(practically never on it), and is used to indicate minor
pauses, such as a semicolon or even a comma, quite as much
as for a full stop.
Accentua- Accentuation is rarer than punctuation in Greek papyri,
and quite as fluctuating in its appearance. It is not found
at all in non-literary documents, and in literary MSS. its
use is sporadic. It does not appear in the Petrie papyri
of the third century B. c, nor in the Louvre Hyperides of
the following century. The earliest example of the use
of accents is in the Bacchylides MS., where they are also
more plentiful than in any other papyrus ; and it is worth
noticing that this is likewise one of the most carefully
written papyri in existence, and is therefore probably
something more than a copy for private use. Accents are
also somewhat freely used in the Alcman fragment in the
Louvre, which is probably of the latter part of the first

tion.

PAPYRUS AS WRITING MATERIAL 29

century B. c. ; and more scantily in the British Museum
Odyssey papyrus (early first century) and two fragments of
the Eiad in the Louvre (first and second centuries). The
Harris and Bankes papyri of the Iliad, which will be found
placed below in the first and second centuries, though the
former has hitherto been held to be older, have many
accents, but not by the first hand, so that their date is
uncertain; and the same is true of the British Museum
papyrus of the last two books of the Iliad (Pap. cxxviii).
In the much later MS. of Iliad ii-iv (Pap. oxxvi), which
is probably of the third century, the accents are by the
first hand. None of the Hyperides MSS. in the British
Museum has accents, and the Herodas only a few isolated
examples.

It is thus clear that accents are not to be looked for in
papyri with any confidence, and are never used to the full
extent that has since become customary. Even fairly well
written MSS., such as the Petrie Phaedo and Antiope, the
Hjrperides papyri, and the British Museum Iliads (with
the exception of the latest), have none by the first hand.
It is perhaps significant that the only two texts (earlier
than the third century) in which they are at all largely
used are both of them lyric poets. It may well be that in
Bacchylides and Alcman the scribes felt that the reader
required more assistance than in Homer or Hyperides. In
these MSS. accents are especially applied to the longer
words, and particularly to compounds, which are somewhat
misleading to the eye. Prepositions, articles, pronouns,
and adverbs very rarely have them, unless there is some-
thing abnormal about them, as when a preposition follows
its case {e.g. Kparos v-aep in Bacch. xviii. 51). In the case
of diphthongs, the acute accent is generally on the first
letter, and the circumflex over both, contrary to modern
usage. In the Bacchylides the accent is never placed on
the final syllable in oxytone words, but the preceding
syllables have the grave accent; e.g. ■nayKpaTT]s, Kparos.

30 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

The explanation of this is to be found in the original
theory of accentuation, according to which every syllable
has an accent, but only one in each word is acute, the rest
being grave; e.g. avdpa-iTos, xapSta, should be written
&v6ponTos, Kapbia. In practice the grave accents were
omitted ; but why they were revived, to the exclusion of the
acute, in oxytone words, is not clear. Traces of the same
practice are found in the Harris and Bankes Homers;
e.g. ekiov, ^peaiv, and (in a proparoxytone word) ejTfcra-evovTo''.
The general principle governing the use of accentuation
in the papyrus period would seem to be that accents were
only inserted if the scribe felt they were wanted as an aid
to reading, and (so far as yet appears) solely in texts of the
poets. Just at the end of the period they came into more
general use, and were sometimes supplied to previously
existing MSS. ; but at this stage the supersession of
papyrus by vellum came about, and accents once more
disappeared from Greek texts for some hundreds of years.

Breath- Much the Same may be said of breathings, which are
usually found in the same MSS. as accents. No papyrus
is early enough to show the letter H in its original use as
an aspirate; but the two halves of this letter, h and -\,
indicating the rough and smooth breathings respectively,
ai'e found in the Bacchylides MS. (though not uniformly),
and in a few instances in the British Museum Odyssey
papyrus. The more usual forms, however, both in these
MSS. and elsewhere, are "- and -',or r and ■> . The rounded
breathing is not found in papyri, though the inverted
comma (') is used as a mark of elision in the Bacchylides
and other MSS. As with the accents, breathings are only
used intermittently, when the scribe thought them neces-
sary in order to avoid confusion or mistake.

Other Marks of diaeresis (••) are often used over t and v,
especially at the beginnings of words. They are found in
non-literary as well as literary papyri.

1 Catalogue of Ancient MSS. (Greek) in tM British Museum, pp. i, 6.

jngs.

marks.

PAPYRUS AS WRITING MATERIAL 31

Dots are sometimes placed over letters, to indicate that
they are cancelled. This is especially found in the large
Hyperides MS. and the Herodas ; elsewhere it is more usual
to draw the pen through the cancelled letters. Corrections
are normally written between the lines, above the words
for which they are to be substituted ; occasionally (e. g. in
the Aristotle papyrus) they are inclosed between two dots,
but this is unessential. Omitted lines are supplied in the
upper and lower margins, with a mark at the place where
they are to be inserted {e.g. Bacchylides and Herodas
MSS.). The margins (lateral as well as upper and lower)
are also the place for scholia [e.g. Odyssey papyrus, Brit.
Mus. Pap. cxxviii, etc.).

Other marks, such as 7 or = to fill up blank spaces at
the end of a line (Brit. Mus. Hyperides MSS.), a hyphen
{J) under compounds to show that they are single words
(Bacchylides MS.), and the like, are apparently due to the
fancies of the individual scribes, and explain themselves.
Two of the critical marks used by Aristarchus to indicate
spurious or repeated lines in Homer (the hmXi], >, and
asterisk) are found in Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxviii {II. xxiii,
xxiv), the Oxford papyrus of II. ii, and perhaps in Brit.
Mus. Pap. CCLXXI [Od. iii) ; but they are not fully inserted
in any of these MSS.

A brief mention should be made of the rules for the Division
division of words in Greek papyri, because the point is at end
often of importance in the restoration of mutilated texts. °^ ''"'^•
If a word has to be divided at the end of a line, the rule
is that the division should be made after a vowel, except -
in the case of doubled consonants, where it is made after
the first consonant, or where the first of two or more
consonants is a liquid or nasal, when it is divided from the
others. Thus, in the course of a few lines of Hyperides
Pro Euocenippo the following examples occur: 'iki\yov,
6^|/x<i), hi.\Kaarripiov, 8tKa.|<rTa(, a\jA.ot, ^xoii|res. In the case

32 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

of words compounded with a preposition, the division
is most commonly made after the preposition; but not
unfrequently the normal tendency to make the break at
a vowel prevails. Thus we have ela\ayyi\koit,ivcav, ■npo(T\-
r}Kiv, but also eijo-ayyeXiaj, v\T:eka.fj.^avis. The same tendency
is seen at its strongest in such divisions as TaC|r', ov\k,
Ka\6\ which are far from uncommon. Breaches of these
rules are practically unknown in literary papyri ^- The
only point in which variation is admitted is in combina-
tions of (T with another consonant, some scribes making the
division before the o-, and some after it. Thus in some
MSS. we find 8iKacr|ra^, and in others hiKa\<TTai Occasionally
the same scribe will fluctuate in his practice in this respect.
With regard to non-literary documents it is dangerous to
assert an universal negative, on account of their great
number ; but a special search through a considerable body
of them has failed to find a single example of a division
contrary to the principles above stated, and it is at least
clear that the rule is so generally observed that any breach
of it must be regarded as quite exceptional.

Abbrevia- Abbreviations are not found in well-written literary
'°"^" papyri, with the exception of two Psalters (late third
and seventh centuries), in which the common compendia
for Kvpios, dios, K.T.X., occur. In literary texts written in
cursive hands, however, they are found somewhat largely
in use. The chief example is the papyrus of the 'Adriva[mv
UoXneCa, where two of the writers whose hands occur in
the MS. use twenty-five abbreviations for common words
such as articles, prepositions, Kai, ovv, (Ivai, k.t.X. The large
medical papyrus in the British Museum (Pap. cxxxvii)
uses nearly as many, some, but not all, being identical.
One of the Herculaneum papyri of Philodemus (Pap. 157-

' The contrary is stated by Wattenbach {Griech. Pa'aogr. 3rd ed., pp. 15,
ii8\ who characterizes the division of'woi'ds iu Egyptian papyri as 'ganz
regellos ' ; but this is quite a misconception.

PAPYRUS AS WRITING MATERIAL 33

15a) has a few abbreviations ^ and there are also a few
in the scholia to the Alcman fragment, and in a collection
of rhetorical exercises in the British Museum (Pap. cclvi
verso) ; but these exhaust the list of literary texts contain-
ing such symbols. In non-literary papyri, as might be
expected, they are more freely used, especially in accounts
and receipts. Still more common, however, than the use
of symbols to denote the terminations of words {k, t, and
the like) is the practice of abbreviating words by the
simple omission of terminations. This is found in tlie
Aristotle and medical MSS. above-mentioned, but is es-
pecially frequent in non-literary documents. The regular
system of such abbreviations is to omit the latter part
of the word, and to elevate the last letter remaining above
the line, or else to draw a line over it as a mark of
abbreviation; thus either irpo'- or tt/jok may stand for
TrpoKeirai. Abbreviations such as these explain themselves,
and do not admit of tabulation ; but a list of symbols used
in abbreviations is given in an appendix. Contraction,
in the sense of the omission of the middle portion of
words, such as occurs in mediaeval Latin MSS and in
modern letters, is not found in Greek papyri ^.

The study of tachygraphy is too special a subject to Taehy-
be dealt with here, and the explanation of the few extant ^™^ ^'
specimens of it on papyrus is still obscure^. No long
document in this style of writing has yet been discovered ;
and though several small examples are said to be in the
Rainer collection at Vienna, they have hitherto been only
imperfectly published, and the explanation of their systems
has, in most cases, still to be given.

' Seott, Fragmenta Herculanensia, p. 98.

^ A supposed instance to the contrary has been pointed out in Grenfell's
Greek Papyri, i. 24 (now Brit. Mus. Pap. ncxx), 1. 6, where fiaaarjs is given
as the reading of the MS. for 0am\i<Tcrrjs. In reality the word is not con-
tracted at all, but simply written in a very cursive fashion.

' See (in addition to the older literature) Gitlbauer, Vie Brei Systeme cler
griechisohen Tachygraphie (1894), and Wessely, ISin System altgriechischer Tacky-
graphie (1895), both in the Denkschriften of the Vienna Academy.

I>

CHAPTER III.

NON-LITEEABY PAPTKI ^

The three The history of Greek writing upon papyrus has three
periods of ^ell-marked periods, the distinction between which is the
palaeo- foundation of all palaeographical knowledge of the subject,
grap y. ijij^ggg periods correspond to the three political administra-
tions by which the country was successively governed after
the extinction of the native Egyptian empire. From 323
to 30 B. c. it was under the sway of the Ptolemies ; from
the conquest by Augustus to the re-organization of the
empire by Diocletian, it was administered from Rome;
and from the time of Diocletian to that of the Arab
conquest in A. D. 640, it was a part of the eastern or
Byzantine division of the Roman world. The changes in
the prevalent type of handwriting curiously reflect the
changes in the administration; and the classification of
hands as Ptolemaic, Roman, or Byzantine is not merely
conventional, but corresponds to real difierences of character
which can be made obvious to the most untrained eye.

It is, however, only of the non-literary hands that this
proposition is true in so extreme a form; and the reason
for this does not seem difficult to imagine. The pattern

' In parts of this chapter I have made use of my own treatment of the
same subject In the Introduction to the first volume of the Catalogue of
Greek Papyri in the British Museum (1893), but vrith amplifications and modi-
fications according to the new material which has come to light since
that was written. The book is, of course, one which will have come into
the hands of few but specialists.

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI 35

for the non-literary hands — not merely for those of pro-
fessional clerks, but, through them, also for those of private
persons — was set by the government officials, and varied
according as the higher members of that class came from
Alexandria, Rome, or Constantinople. The literary class,
on the other hand, had no direct dependence on the
political capital. If they were dependent on any outside
influence, it was that of Greece, the fountain from which
their higher inspirations were drawn, and with which they
were connected by a strong and continuous tradition. Only
gradually, and at some considerable distance, were the
fashions of literary manuscripts affected by the contem-
porary varieties in every-day writing ; and it requires
a little practice to see where the characteristics of non-
literary papyri manifest themselves in the literary hands
of the same period. That they do manifest themselves,
however, will, it is hoped, be shown in the following
chapters; and the full and certain knowledge which we
now have of non-literary palaeography goes far to lay
a firm foundation for the more interesting and important
branch of the subject which deals with the literary
manuscripts.

The beginning of the history of papyrus-palaeography I-Ptole-
is fixed, for the present, by the discoveries of Mr. Flinders period :

Petrie in i88q, when he extricated a mass of documents of *^® Petne

papyri,
the third century B. c. from a number of mummy-cases found

at Gurob. The mummy-cases, instead of being of wood,
were made of a kind of papier-mS,ch4 the material being
papyrus, coated over with plaster. The papyri were evi-
dently nothing but the produce of the waste-paper baskets
of the period, torn, cut, pasted together just as they came,
defaced by the plaster and mutilated by rough handling; yet
these same rubbish-heaps, patiently sorted and set in order
by Prof. Mahaffy, are now the foundation of our knowledge
of Greek palaeography. To these must be added the great
Eevenue Papyrus of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the greater

D 3

36 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

part of which was acquired by Mr. Petrie in 1893, and the
rest by Mr. Grenfell in the following year ; but this only
confirmed by additional examples the knowledge which
the Petrie papyri had already established. Before Mr.
Petrie's discovery there were, it is true, a few documents
of the third century already extant in some of the great
European libraries ; but they were undated, and there was
nothing to show their real age, which, in consequence,
was generally underrated. About the age of the Petrie
papyri there could be no doubt. Many of them were wills,
petitions, and similar documents, bearing precise and
indisputable dates in the reigns of the earliest Ptolemies
(with the exception of Ptolemy Soter, the founder of the
dynasty). The earliest definite date was in the year
270 B.C., the latest was in 186 B.C.; and there was no
reasonable doubt that the great mass of undated documents
lay between these limits, and that nearly all of them
belonged to the third century B. c. Subsequent examina-
tion of the previously undeciphered fragments of the collec-
tion has, indeed, revealed one or two later dates, but has done
nothing whatever to shake the general conclusion. From
some seventy definitely dated documents in a great variety
of hands, and from many scores of undated documents
of the same period, we have ample means for estimating
the character of Greek writing in Egypt — and specifically
in the Fayyum — in the third century B. c.^

The first characteristic which strikes the eye in the
writing of this period as a whole is its freedom and
breadth. The style is light and flowing, strokes are free
and curved, without being necessarily careless and ill-

1 The descriptions which follow will be more intelligible if read with
the series of facsimiles published by the Palaeographical Society, or the
atlases accompanying the Catalogue of Greek Papyri in the British Museum (vols.
i. and ii.). A very useful table of alphabets is given in Sir E. M. Thomp-
son's Handbook of Qreek and Latin Palaeography. The facsimiles given in the
present volume, though fairly characteristic of their respective periods, are
too few to exhaust all their varieties.

Plate I.

I|

m

'5"

■I

--I
5

<^ > r^ 4

1

:f

»^1»r

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI 37

formed. Such hands, indeed, there are among them, in
which cursiveness borders closely on illegibility; but the
characteristic hand of the period is graceful and easy,
showing at once a full command of the pen and a plentiful
supply of papyrus. Letters such as M, FT, T have an almost
excessive breadth in their horizontal strokes, and it needs
a good-sized piece of papyrus to contain any appreciable
quantity of writing. The Roman style is altogether smaller
and more compact; that of the Byzantine period, though
its letters are sometimes quite as large, is squarer, gene-
rally heavier, and shows more signs of deliberate care
and conscious style. The Ptolemaic scribe wrote freely
and often well, but without self -consciousness.

Another characteristic of Ptolemaic writing is the appear-
ance, which it generally presents, of a horizontal line along
the top of the letters. Most of the letters are shallow, and
the horizontal strokes in them are formed near the top,
while the perpendicular strokes project very Httle above
the line and are carried far down below it. Thus M (a very
characteristic letter in Ptolemaic hands) is generally formed
of two perpendicular strokes, stretching well below the
line, and united at their tops by a horizontal stroke with
a very shallow curve. This feature is not found in either
of the later periods, and indeed is more characteristic
of the third century B. c. than of the later Ptolemaic age.
Good writing of the Roman period has few prominently
projecting letters at all ; while the Byzantine hand, though
marked by very long upright strokes, presents the appear-
ance of an even line along the bottom of the writing, with
projections bristling along the top.

The specimen shown in the accompanying facsimile
(Plate I) is part of a letter of the year 342 B.C., and is
a fairly characteristic example of the hand of this period.
The completely cursive character of the writing is obvious
at first sight, as well as the line along the tops of the
letters described above. There are no signs of difficulty

38 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

or of unfamiliarity with the use of .the pen. It is clear
that writing of such freedom and ease has a long history
behind it.
The third With regard to the forms of individual letters in docu-
cen ury ments of the third century, the most characteristic are i\,
M, N, TT, T, Y, and CO. <^ is often found, especially in the
less carefully written papyri, in the shape of a simple wedge
(/!-,^); M, as described above, has a very shallow curve
between two nearly perpendicular strokes ( n) J N frequently
has its final upright stroke carried up far above the line
{fJ, (-•) ; n is either broad and low or rounded into an almost
semi-circular curve ; T is almost always without the right-
hand portion of its cross-bar, being written with a single
stroke of the pen ; Y generally has a large loop, carried
further to the left than the right (t) ; while CO habitually
has its second loop represented by an almost or quite
straight line. These characteristics are, no doubt, most
apparent when the writing is least careful and formal ; but
few documents of the period are without some of them.
There is very little modulation of fine and- thick strokes.
As a rule the lines, though not heavy, are thick and black ;
and there is much unevenness in the size of the letters.
Hence the writing of this century, free and flowing though
it often is, is rarely very ornamental. The enthusiasm
of the first discoverers led them at times to speak too
highly in its praise ; but an unprejudiced comparison of it
with the hands of the succeeding centuries will show that,
at least in the specimens hitherto known, it is inferior
in regularity and handsomeness.

Second ^^^ *^^ ^^^* ^^^^ °^ *^® second century b. c. our material

century is mainly drawn from the papyri found in the Serapeum
B- c. at Memphis, many of which were written by a single scribe,

a Greek recluse in the Serapeum named Ptolemy. There
are, however, several examples of other hands, which justify
us in using this group of documents as fair evidence for
their period. As a whole, these hands are larger, more

Platk II.

■'|»»W»i?'li?'yT!' if pi f Wff''«vwil<yjp,««W»*f^ y i t ^ ^

1|. : 1

4 i^i 1

i >> 1 4 * f St

1 M i ¥ .

^- ^ i ? ^ -^

A

I «

t

^ ^i ^

all I

5 1 1 1 J
I J I ^ I

w

I

■■ 7.

I'
it;

i:

.'•»■

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI 39

regular, and less cursive than those of the preceding cen-
tury. The letters have more of an uncial form, and are
only linked together in groups of two and three. The
better-written specimens are clear and regular, and some-
times even handsome. The appearance of a line along the
top of the writing ceases almost entirely. Of the individual
letters, the wedge-shaped A is rarely found after the third
century ; it is of the minuscule type, but the loop is some-
times represented by a mere straight line (A") ; M is still
sometimes marked by its shallow depression, but oftener
the middle loop is carried lower down and bent to an angle
in the centre, so as to resemble a rough uncial M; B is
very large, often extending both above and below the line ;
the first stroke of H is higher than the second, which
rarely rises above the cross-bar, and is linked to the
following letter by a horizontal stroke from the top;
K is generally large, especially the upright stroke; N is
sometimes of the third century pattern, with the last stroke
rising above the hue, but is oftener of the normal uncial
shape ; T has acquired the right-hand portion of its cross-
bar, though it is still often written without lifting the pen,
by making the cross-bar first and then drawing the pen
backwards and downwards; at other times the first half
of the cross-bar and the down-stroke are formed together,
as in the third century, and the second half of the cross-bar
is added separately, being often attached to the succeeding
letter ; Y is not unlike T, being made by forming a wide,
shallow curve, and then drawing the pen backwards and
downwards; 0) is generally of the ordinary minuscule
type, though the second loop is still sometimes clipped.

The facsimile shown in Plate II (from Brit. Mus. Pap.
XLiv) is, perhaps, the best specimen of calligraphy among the
Serapeum papyri, though another (Pap. xxiv) is in a larger
and bolder hand. It is a petition from the above-mentioned
Ptolemy, son of Glaucias, for protection and redress on
account of an assault made upon him by some of the

40 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Egyptian attendants in the temple. It is dated in the year
i6i B.C., and is written in a clear, regular, and notably
well-formed hand — certainly not Ptolemy's own, but
probably that of a professional scribe.
Late se- The second half of this century was almost a blank, so
tuiys, <j. far as palaeography was concerned, until the purchase
by Messrs. Grenfell and Hogarth, in 1894-5 and 1895-6,
of a large number of dated documents in very good
condition, which cover this period very fully and extend
into the following century. In these papyri, which come
from the neighbourhood of Thebes, we see the revival
of a fully cursive style of writing; or perhaps it would
be more true to say that they justify the belief that a more
cursive style than that of the Serapeum documents was in
existence during the earlier half of the century, as it had
been in the third century. The cursive hand of 150-100 B. c.
(see Plate III) is, however, quite distinct from that of 270-
300 B. c. It is smaller, better formed, and more ornamental ;
with quite as much liberty as its predecessor, but less
licence. The scribes have learnt to be regular without
being stiff, and the sizes of the letters are better propor-
tioned to one another. It is the best period of the
Ptolemaic cursive, and comes just before its decline and
disappearance. At the same time, it is the most diflScult
style of writing to describe in words. The forms of the
individual letters are less noticeable and peculiar than
in the earlier hands, and approximate to those of the
Roman period ; and yet the general aspect of the writing
is unmistakably Ptolemaic. It lacks the roundness of the
Eoman style, and the letters are of a uniform thickness,
without modulation of broad and thin strokes, with a ten-
dency to thickness and blackness throughout. Of the
individual letters, A is generally small, and its loop becomes
either a round spot or a straight line; H generally has
a ligature attached to its last stroke, whether there is
another letter for it to be linked with or not; the same

Plate III.

^.^^f

LOAN. — B.C. 105.

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI 41

is the case with N ; Y fluctuates between its earlier shape
and one more resembling a Y, of which the left-hand arm
is generally longer than the right. But, on the whole,
little reliance can be placed in the forms of single letters at
this period ; while, on the other hand, the general appear-
ance of this small, even cursive can hardly be mistaken.

The first century was, until quite lately, the most obscure The first
period in the whole history of papyrus-palaeography; and b. c. '^
it cannot even yet be said to be adequately known. On
the one hand there were a few documents dated between
100 and 80 B. C, which carried on the tradition of the
preceding century without much recognizable variation ; and
on the other there were a few which belonged to the last
decade of the century, in which the Roman cast of hand was
already well developed. The interval of transition is now
precariously bridged by some papyri acquired by Messrs.
Hogarth and Grenfell during their campaign on behalf
of the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1895-6. The chief
conclusion to be derived from these is that the transition
was very rapid. In the early part of the century the
Ptolemaic cursive is seen to be breaking up. It becomes
less firm and regular, and loses its sense of style. Under
Ptolemy Lathyrus and Auletes it is an ugly and a broken
hand. In the middle of the century (if the dates assigned
to these documents, which are sometimes uncertain, are to
be trusted), several forms of letters which are characteristic
of the reign of Augustus are found intermixed with
Ptolemaic forms; and by the close of the century the
Ptolemaic forms have entirely disappeared, and the writing
is distinctly Roman. The only criterion that can be given
for the determination of MSS. of this period is to remember
that it is an age of transition, and to look for an inter-
mixture of forms. The styles of the end of the second
century B.C. and of the beginning of the first Christian
century must be known first, and the intermediate stage
will then be recognizable.

42 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

II. Roman If one Special characteristic is to be assigned as, more
Period. ^j^^^ ^^^ other, marking off the Roman period from its
predecessor and its successor, it is roundness. Straight,
stiff lines are avoided ; curved, flowing strokes take their
place wherever possible. Ligatures, which in the Ptolemaic
cursive hand were generally straight lines, are generally-
curved in the Roman hand. There is more modulation
of strokes, and the somewhat thick and black aspect
of Ptolemaic writing disappears. It also becomes usual
to write letters as much as possible without raising the
pen. This is especially noticeable in the case of €, the
cross-bar of which is now very commonly attached to its
upper curve (C", C); and this formation may be taken
as an almost conclusive proof of a Roman date. In early
Roman documents, on either side of the beginning of the
Christian era, Y is very noticeable for the deep curve
of its upper part and rather prominent development of its
tail (^). Other letters besides € exemplify the tendency
to form letters in single strokes. The oblique strokes of K
become a curve attached to the bottom of the upright
stroke by an obliquely-rising ligature, so that the whole
letter assumes a shape resembling a written u. An almost
identical shape is often assumed by B, which begins in this
period to be frequently formed with open top, though the
capital form continues contemporaneously. The cross-bar
of N becomes a curve uniting the tops of the two upright
strokes (/X). A change is also observable in T,, which
becomes fork-shaped in many instances, and sometimes
almost has the form of a V (T, y). Even c[) is written
without raising the pen, being formed of a semi-circular
curve, the end of which is attached to the top of the
perpendicular stroke, and the latter not unfrequently falls
outside the curve altogether; at other times the circle
is represented by a stroke resembling an s lying on its
side, through which the perpendicular stroke descends.
These characteristics run, more or less, through all the

Plate IV.

" ft- ^-e 4' V # jj^ » * ^ "W ,J
^' -^ _ -i. .V. T" 'i ~ i^ :& '.

^■i- ■£■«■--' 3-1- |2t':

^ V^- ^ '^ M A v^ 4''l. i^^

> >c J y 1^. ,v, c <;>.--X *^ i 1

Plate V.

X-

1-.

5 ? i

r "

t^ X-^

if, O O

■^

^

&

^.^

V

o

E

w ,/ Its

i-ri

■'■*.
t '

■n

^

'•^^:

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI 43

Roman period, serving to diflferentiate it from the Ptolemaic First
and Byzantine ages, but not sufficing for the accurate *^'*" "'''•
dating of MSS. within the first three centuries. This is
a matter partly of general appearance, partly of variations
in a few individual letters. Documents of the reign of
Augustus and his successors as far as the middle of the
first century are generally written in a bolder and more
angular hand than those of a later date^. The forms
of the letters are more pronounced, as in the case of Y,
mentioned above, € and K. In the middle of the century
these angles have been smoothed away, and the round,
graceful character of the best Roman cursive is fully
developed. Indeed the hand may be said to be at its best
between the years 50 and 100. The specimen here given
(Plate V), from a poll-tax register of A. d. 72-3 (Brit. Mus.
Pap. CCLX), is a good example of the larger hand of the
period, and one which will be found useful in assigning
a date to some literary papyri in a later chapter. At the
same time a smaller hand, and one much more difficult
to read, came into fashion in the reign of Domitian ; and
small hands, though not unknown earlier in the Roman
period, become predominant from this point until the end
of the second century or later ; increased cursiveness going,
as usual, with reduced size of the letters. An example,
from the extreme end of the first century, is given in
Plate VI (Brit. Mus. Pap. cxliii).

Two letters are especially useful as indications of manu- H and C.
scripts written in the latter part of the first century and
the first half of the second. These are H and C. The
former letter, during this period, has two quite distinct
forms. One is the familiar H-shape, in which the cross-bar
usually rises slightly and the second upright descends from
it in a shallow curve ; this is found more or less throughout
the period, and in itself contains no criterion of age. But

1 PlatelV, an official document from the beginning of thereign of Tiberius
(Brit. Mus. Pap. oclxxvi), is a fairly characteristic example of this style.

44 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

by the side of this there is another form, consisting of a
horizontal curve with an almost perpendicular tail ("], ^),
which is characteristic of a comparatively limited space
of time. In appearance it resembles the Y of the same
period, and is often only distinguishable from it by the
fact that its tail is either perpendicular or curls to the left,
while the tail of the Y curls to the right. This form of
H is, in point of origin, a modification of the ordinary
H-shape, in which the first perpendicular stroke is so
much slurred as almost to disappear, and accidental ap-
proximations to it are occasionally found in much earlier
documents ; but to these no importance can be attached,
and the real range of its currency may be stated as being
from about A.D. 50 to about 160^. There are sporadic
instances later than this, as is inevitably the case with
every palaeographical characteristic ; but the material for
the first three centuries is now so plentiful that we are
justified in asserting that the practical disappearance of
this form at about the date named is not accidental,
or a fancy based on the absence of evidence, but really
represents a fact in palaeography.

In the case of C the data are less precise, but still useful.
The C of the Ptolemaic period is upright and has invari-
ably a horizontal top (c ). In the early Roman period the
upright form is still maintained, and often the horizontal
top as well, though the Eoman fondness for curves shows
itself in the increasing use of a rounded top. Towards
the end of the century the curve has a tendency to be
carried further over, and the letter assumes a tumble-down
appearance (r , O, i^) ; while in the next century it sometimes
even passes the horizontal stage, and becomes a backward-

' It is found very plentifully in the first and fourth hands of the
Aristotle papyrus (indeed it was here that its existence was first noted),
written about A. d. 100, and also in the accounts on the recto of the same
papyrus, which were written in a. t>. 78-9. Plate VI, a receipt of a. d, 97,
not only has this letter but generally resembles the style of the Aristotle
MS., and confirms the date assigned to it.

Plate VI.

f ' 2^^"*^^ /^^ ^^ ^^'^'O '^' ■=- % .vs;^t.^» A-i

RECEIPT. — A.D. 97.

Plate VII.

y^ S vH i *^'^***^ ^ ''^**'^'^'*^'^^

'•■; .3"- ,1" ■'v:.<^-~-' ,r' - ••

RECEIPT.— A. D. 166.

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI 45

facing curve (^, ^■, e.g. Oy = ay). The upright C with
flattened top continues simultaneously with this form
throughout the whole period, and consequently is not
to be taken as a sign of early date; but the tumble-
down C, according to the fairly plentiful evidence which
we now have on the subject, can hardly be earlier than
the end of the first century. Early in the third century
the upright form seems to have been universally resumed,
though in a larger and coarser type.

For the second century palaeographical material is more Second
plentiful than for any other period in the whole history •=®°*"''>'-
of writing upon papyrus, not a single year being un-
represented by at least one accurately dated document.
It is, of course, useless to pretend to lay down precise
laws for the discernment of documents of successive decades,
but the general lines of development may be indicated.
In papyri of the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, the
letters are usually of fair breadth, and are reasonably
well formed ; while in the reign of Antoninus Pius, and
still more of Marcus Aurelius, the increased cursiveness
of the prevalent hand leads to the compression of letters
and often to their slovenly formation. A very small
and very cursive hand is especially characteristic of the
reign of Marcus ^ ; and in many of the receipts and leases
of this period it requires little less than divination to make
out the scribe's intention — especially if, as often happens,
illiteracy be added to cursiveness. A reaction from this
very minute style is manifest in the reign of Commodus
and under the emperors of the first part of the third
century; but though the writing gets larger, there is no
regeneration in the formation of the letters. On the con-
trary, from this point may be dated the break-up of the
Roman hand. The writing becomes rough and coarse, and
often extremely ugly. Letters are less formed and worse Third
formed, and the writing straggles unevenly over the page. ''^^ ^'
' See Plate VII, a receipt of a. j>. 166 (Brit. Mus. Pap. ccoxxxii).

46 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

To this rule, as to all others, there are exceptions; one
(Brit. Mus. Pap. cccxxii) so marked as to make us dis-
trust the cogency of the argument which, on the ground
of the occurrence in it of the name of Aurelius, assigns it
to this period ^.

About the second quarter of the third century a marked
improvement takes place, for which no adequate reason can
be assigned, unless it be a mere accident in the survival
of evidence. As a rule, the variations in handwriting in
Egypt curiously correspond to the changes of government.
The rise of a new government is accompanied by the ap-
pearance of a new style of writing, and the decay of the
writing goes hand in hand with that of the administration.
The rise of the Ptolemies, the collapse under Auletes and
his fleeting successors, the advent of the Eomans and
the firm rule of the early emperors, the decline when
Commodus and Caracalla succeeded Antoninus and
Marcus, the reorganization of the empire under Diocle-
tian, all have their palaeographical parallels in the docu-
ments of the period; but there seems to be no reason
why the chaotic years about the middle of the third
century should show any improvement on their prede-
cessors. The fact, however, remains visible in such
evidence as we possess, and there are several extant
documents between a.d. 250 and 280 which are written
in tidy and even ornamental hands {e.g. Brit. Mus. Pap.
cccLi, Paris Pap. 69 e, and a Berlin papyrus shown in
plate xiv of Wilcken's Tafeln).

At this point in the history (about the middle of the
third century), the evidence which has been so plentiful
since the beginning of the Christian era suddenly becomes
extremely meagre. Indeed for the important period of
transition in the reign of Diocletian evidence was wholly

' The use of the name Aurelius by private individuals was granted in
A. D. 212, and thenceforward it becomes so common as almost to be uni-
versal ; but there are certain instances of its use as far back as A, d. 175.

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI 47

wanting until the acquisition by Mr. Grenfell, in 1895-6,
of a small group of documents (now in the British Museum)
from the years on either side of the turn of the century.
For the present, therefore, one can only speak with some
uncertainty as to the details of the change. That a change,
however, did take place, is manifest on a comparison of
papyri of the middle of the fourth century with those of
a hundred years earlier, the difference between them being
quite as marked as that between papyri of the reigns of
Auletes and Augustus. The transition period is brief, but
has a weU-marked character of its own. Writing becomes
smaller again, though not so small as in the second century.
It is compressed laterally, and the letters are stiffer and more
angular in formation, with a tendency to lean forward.
It looks as if the formalism of the Byzantine age began
to impress itself upon its scribes even from the very
beginning of the revolution brought about by Diocletian.

For the fourth century nearly all the evidence at present Fourth
extant consists of a single group of papers, containing ^^^ "'^''
the correspondence of a certain Abinnaeus, who was the
commander of a body of auxiliary cavalry quartered at
Dionysias, in the Fayyum, for some years on either side
of A.D. 350. The larger part of this collection is now
in the British Museum ^ ; the rest are at Geneva. To
these have to be added two examples of the more orna-
mental writing of the period, published in Wilcken's
Tafeln (Nos. xv. and xvi.), and a few magical and other
undated papyri which, in the light of the Abinnaeus
papyri, we can now confidently assign to this century.
There are also some good specimens in the Eainer collec-
tion at Vienna, but these are not yet published; and
the same is the case (so far as facsimiles are concerned)
with the fourth-century documents among the Oxyrhynchus

• Many of these are reproduced in the atlas of facsimiles accompanying
vol. ii. of Greek Papyri in the British Museum ; and one, which is a good
example of the better hands in the collection, is given in Plate VIII.

48 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

papyri and at Berlin. The most striking general charac-
teristic of fourth-century writing is an increase of size and
(in the better written and representative examples) of calli-
graphic style and ornament. The letters are boldly formed,
with sharp angles and prominent strokes. The better hands
are generally composed of fine- and delicate lines, which
emphasize the sharpness of the angles and the boldness
of the curves ; but the more illiterate hands, of which
there are many among the Abinnaeus papyri, are often
very thick and coarse. Of single letters the most notice-
able are K and O, on account of their increased size and
prominence. The sharp angles and projecting upper
strokes of K almost always catch the eye in documents
of this period ; while O, which in Ptolemaic and Eoman
writings is often reduced almost to a dot, is now a large
and conspicuous letter. The right-hand stroke of A is
often widely separated from the rest of the letter; and
sometimes a d-shaped letter takes the place of the familiar
form. The upper half of e is a straight oblique stroke,
point&ig to the right {i) ; while rj has already acquired
the h-shape which belongs to it throughout the Byzantine
period. C once more stands upright, generally with a
flattened top, as in the Ptolemaic and early Eoman age.
Finally Y is v-shaped, and ceases to be a conspicuous
letter. The general impression left by a page of good
writing of this period is one of regularity and order,
though not so mechanical as it subsequently became.
III. By- The largest unexplored tract now left in the history
Period. of cursive writing on papyrus is that from about A.D.
Fifth 060 to about A.D. 1500. A few documents from the

century. ^ . '-' .

Great Oasis, recently acquired by the British Museum from
Mr. Grenfell, represent the years on either side of 400, and
tend to show that the style current in the middle of the
century had not greatly changed by then. The Kainer col-
lection possesses some fragments of the fifth century, but
these have not been published, and are not available for

Plate VIII.

^-7ri^'<>^».- *^?5ifr ,:^:: .,^tii

II .,,,.,,,., , ..--;j^^,^^,.

f;2

LETTER, — arc A.D. 350.

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI 49

comparison. It is not until close to the end of the century,
in A. D. 487 and 498, that dated materials are again acces-
sible, and these cannot be separated from the sixth century
in general. There, on the contrary, material is once more
plentiful. The first Fayyum find, which has supplied
documents in thousands to Vienna and Berlin, and in
lesser quantities to Paris, Oxford, and London, consisted
almost entirely of papyri belonging to this later Byzantine
period, extending from the beginning of the sixth century
to the end of , Greek writing in Egypt. Unfortunately,
the number of precisely dated documents of this period
bears a very small proportion to that of the undated
or insufiiciently dated ^ This is largely due to the
practice of dating by the fifteen-year period known as the
indiction (see below, p. 54), which by itself is quite useless
for the purpose of determining the age of a document
after the lapse of a few years. The consequence is that,
while it is generally very easy to assign a hand to the later
Byzantine period, it is very difficult to determine whether
it is of the sixth or seventh century. The difficulty is
increased by the conservatism of Byzantine scribes, who
adhere for a considerable time to the same type of hand.

Speaking generally, the fully-formed Byzantine hand Sixth and
is a large, well marked, and rather handsome hand ; not centuries.
so delicate as the best examples of the fourth century,
but regular, with ornamental strokes and curves, and
with an unmistakable air of formality. In the best
specimens the writing is upright and square, with plenty
of width, so that any given piece of Byzantine papyrus
contains much less writing than a similar piece of the
Roman, or even of the Ptolemaic period. Many of the
letters, also, are formed in quite peculiar manners. The

' This defect will be rectified when dated facsimiles of the Oxyrhynchus
papyri of the Egypt Exploration Fund are published. The specimen
shown in Plate IX is not dated, but seems from its style to belong to the
sixth century.

E

50 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

loop of a is large and generally open at the top, resembling
a modem a more than any a of the earlier periods. /3 is
generally a long, irregular oval, open at the top, and
with a short tail projecting downwards from the bottom
right-hand corner. The minuscule form of 8, resembling
a Latin d, is increasingly common, and has a very long
upright stroke; but the uncial form is also found. The
upper half of e is still more pronounced than in the fourth
century, projecting obliquely for a considerable distance
above the line [4). rj is generally h-shaped, with a very
long upright stroke, like S. Similarly, the first stroke
of K projects far above the line, the rest of the letter
being u-shaped. The left-hand stroke of A comes far
below the line, and is often widely separated from the
right-hand stroke, fi is in its minuscule form, much as
it is here printed, with its first stroke perpendicular
and stretching far below the line, u varies between the
uncial type, in which case the junction of the oblique
stroke with the second upright often takes the form of
a curve ( U , kl), and a cursive form resembling a Latin n.
o- is well rounded, generally divided in the middle, with
the upper half sometimes rather exaggerated, t, if not
of the ordinary shape, has a long tail and is deeply
forked at the top. v is small and v-shaped, and not
unfrequently becomes little more than a curved ligature
in combination with other letters. The upright stroke
of is generally united to the circle by a well-rounded
curve, and the whole letter is usually large and prominent,
— as, it may be remarked, it likewise is in vellum uncials
of the same period.

Besides this upright hand, a sloping style is also found
in use during these centuries. A papyrus in the British
Museum (cxiii. 5 b) shows it in existence in A. D. 542, but
it is especially characteristic of the later years of this
century and of the seventh century. The shapes of the
individual letters are much the same as those just described,

Plate IX.

\ '

.-V .' ■ ^^vv

• N -<' "^ _i —-^■^ ;*- 9

r

: ~^-^^ ■§ ^^'M'-h^

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI

51

but they assume a marked slope to the right, become
smaller and less square, and are laterally compressed.
a is more closely connected with the letter which follows
it, and is often a mere loop, like the v described above.
The upper half of e is more rounded, and, with the central
cross-stroke, is often separated from the lower half.
The left-hand stroke of X is still more prolonged, con-
tributing much (like the up-strokes of 8 and ?;) to the
sloping appearance of the writing. The tail of the first
stroke of fi is shortened, v is not unfrequently written
above the line, in the shape either of a very wide and
shallow curve, or sometimes of a straight line.

This sloping hand is especially characteristic of the
later part of the Byzantine period, but it did not ex-
tinguish the upright style of writing, which is found
even in the seventh century. For instance, the British
Museum has a good example of it dated in the year 619
(Pap. ccx). Hence it is unusually difficult to assign a
precise date to any undated document of this upright type,
and one must commonly be content to define it merely
as ' sixth or seventh century ' ; though in the later examples
the characters are generally less firm and precise than in
the earlier.

The two types of hand which have just been described
are, both of them, large, and cover a good deal of ground ;
but there is also a small type of hand, which is used
chiefly for accounts and receipts. These are usually
assigned to the seventh, and sometimes to the eighth,
century; but their age is really very uncertain, since
few are dated in any other way than by indictions.
The forms of the letters are much the same as those of
the larger hands, and the projecting strokes of such
letters as S, rj, X, fi, are equally marked ; but their smaller
size calls attention to the fact that the Byzantine hand,
at any rate in its later stages, is definitely a minuscule
hand. Whether written large or small, the forms of

E a

52 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

nearly all the test-letters are now minuscule; and the
special interest of these small hands is that they indicate
the way to the transition from the minuscules of the
papyri to those of the vellum MSS. of the ninth and
tenth centuries. More will have to be said on this point
in a later chapter ; for the present it must suffice to state
the proposition that, while the literary hand of the Roman
period is the parent of the vellum uncial, the Byzantine
non-literary hand is the parent of the vellum minuscule,
which comes to the front in the ninth century as a book-
hand for the first time, and establishes its supremacy
in the tenth.
The end of The exact end of Greek writing upon papyrus cannot
.writing on be fixed; but it is certain that the Arab conquest of
papyrus. Egypt in A.D. 640 gave it its death-blow. Documents
that can be placed with certainty later than this date
are rare; probably there are more at Vienna than
anywhere else, but they are not yet accessible. The
latest papyrus of any length with a precise date is of the
year 683 ; but one long document in the British Museum
(Pap. Lxxvri) is probably of still later date than this '. This
is the will of Abraham, bishop of Hermonthis and head
of the monastery of St. Phoebammon at Djem^, near
Thebes. It forms one of a group of documents, the rest
of which are written in Coptic; one of these is dated
in the year 786, and several others are shown by internal
evidence to belong to about the same date. The will
of Abraham appears to come near the beginning of the
series, but there is nothing to show that it falls outside
the eighth century. It is a large and fairly upright
hand, showing that the traditions of the sixth century
lasted on even till this late date; only the somewhat
broken and degenerate look of the writing, the roundness
and looseness of the shapes of the letters, distinguish

' Complete facsimile in atlaa accompanying vol. i. of Oreek Papyri in the
British Museum.

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI 53

it from the square and precise appearance of the hand
from which it is descended. It marks, however, the close
of Greek writing in Egypt; and it is noticeable that the
bishop, whose testament it is, is expressly said in it to
be ignorant of the Greek language. The Greek language
was, in fact, gradually extinguished by the Arab conquest ;
and with it disappears our knowledge of Greek writing
on papyrus, since in no other land than Egypt has the
brittle material survived to our own time. The full
history of the transition from papyrus to vellum can
never be written, for want of the materials.

One detail of importance in connexion with non-literary The dating

01 papyri.

papyri must be mentioned before closing this sketch of
their history. This is the manner in which they are
dated. The formulas of dating differ, like the hands
themselves, in the Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine
periods. In a Ptolemaic document the date is given by
the regnal year of the reigning sovereign, and the full
formula for this contains not only the name of the king
himself, but also a list of the priesthoods of all the defunct
Ptolemies ; for example (Brit. Mus. Pap. Dcxxiii).

'Qaa-ikevovTuiv KKioirdrpas Koi I3acn\e(i>s TlroXeixalov 6e&v
4>iXoju,jjropcoi' Scor?7ptoi' erous rj, i<f>' lepe'tos tov ovtos iv 'AXe^-
avbpelq 'AXe^avbpov Kat de&v ScoTiypcov koI Qe.&v 'Abe\<j)&v
Koi Be&v EvepyeT&v koi OeSv ^LkoTiaTopcav kol dtSiv 'Ein4>av&v
Koi deov EvTrdropos koI Oeov $i\o/x7jTopos koI deov ^ikonaTOpos
viov Koi Oeov Evepyirov koX df&v ^iXonrjTopoiv ^ton^paiv,
UpovTTciXov 'la-ibos iJ.eydXris ixrjTpos Oe&v, aOXocjiopov BepevCK-qs
EvepyeTibos, Kavr]<i>6pov 'Apinvo-qs ^iXabiXcpov, UpeCas 'Apaivorjs
^iXoTtdropos, T&v ovcr&v h 'AXe^avbpeiq, iv 8e llToXeiiaibi rrjs
©7j;8ai8oy e^' Upewv kol iepeiuv kuI Kavr)(}>6pov t&v ovtwv koi
ova-&v, fj.rivds Mex^'P ^ ^^ KpoKobiXcav lioXei tov HaOvplrov.
All this merely describes the year which we indicate as
B.C. 109. But since such a formula might be accused
of being cumbrous, and of including a good deal of un-

54 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

important matter, it is very often reduced to the simple
statement Irous rj, Mex«'P m. : which errs as much from
brevity as the other does from length, since it omits
the name of the king, and it is not always that the
reign can be identified with certainty.

Roman dates are more business-like, but they too have
a longer and a shorter formula. Dates are given by the
regnal year of the emperor; but in both Ptolemaic and
Roman dates it must be remembered that the year always
begins with the ist Thoth (=29th August). Thus the
first year of a sovereign lasted only from his accession
to the ist Thoth next ensuing. The longer Roman
formulas are of the type erovs rj avroKpaTopos KaCaapos TCtov
Alkiov 'Abpiavov 'AvTavCvov Evaej3ovs 2e;8acrroi3, Me^elp e,
the shorter Irouy rj 'AvtmvCvov Kalaapos rod KvpCov. In
neither case can there be any doubt as to the precise
date intended, and it is only under some of the later
emperors that the accumulation of titles (TepfiavLKov
TlapdiKov AaKLKOV BperavviKov MeyCa-rov, and the like)
becomes cumbersome.

This useful and practical system of dating was, however,
abandoned at the time of the revolution under Diocletian.
In the first instance dating by the consuls of the year
was substituted; but in the year 313 the system of the
indiction was instituted. This was a fifteen-year period,
beginning on difierent days in different parts of the
empire. At Constantinople it began on the ist September,
in Egypt on a fluctuating date about the middle of June,
at the time of the rising of the Nile^- Its origin is
uncertain, but it is probably a modification of the fourteen-
year census-period in use under the Romans. The formula
of dating by the indiction is ^apfxovOi C ^ IvbiKnSyvos,
meaning the fifteenth year of the current indiction-period ;
but as the indiction-periods are not themselves numbered,

' See Greek Papyri in the British Museum, i. 196-8.

NON-LITERARY PAPYRI 55

this dating is absolutely useless from our point of view.
Sometimes the names of the consuls db the regnal year
of the emperor are added, but this is not by any means
the regular practice; and consequently the dating of
Byzantine documents remains an obscure subject, in spite
of the immense mass of material for the period which is
in existence. The publication of select dated facsimiles
from the Vienna and Berlin collections is much to be
desired, in order to remove this obscurity; but perhaps
a speedier revelation may be looked for from the Egypt
Exploration Fund.

CHAPTEE IV

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD

In passing to the consideration of literary papyri, one
enters what is at once the most important and the least
familiar part of the subject. Non-literary papyri, as will
have been seen from the preceding chapter, are plentiful
and fairly well supplied with precise dates ; literary papyri
are comparatively rare and can seldom be dated, even
approximately, on other than purely palaeographical evi-
dence. Nor can all manuscripts which contain literary
works come properly into consideration here, since some
of them are not written in formal book-hand at all, but
in the ordinary private or non-literary hand of the day.
Such is, notably, the papyrus containing Aristotle's Consti-
tution of Athens ; also a large medical manuscript in the
British Museum, containing considerable extracts from the
'larpLKr] Swmywyj? of Menon, the pupil of Aristotle, some-
times ascribed to Aristotle himself; and an astronomical
treatise derived from Eudoxus in the Louvre, of the second
century B. c. In this way the bulk of the materials at our
disposal is reduced ; but on the other hand there are a few
documents of a private or business character which are
written by professional scribes in literary hands ; and these,
bearing, as they do, precise dates, are very valuable items
of evidence for the .construction of the history of papyrus-
palaeography on its literary side.

Indeed the document to which is generally assigned

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 57

the first place in any treatment of the subject is itself,
to some extent, one of this description, being a non-literary
composition written in an uncial hand. This is the so-called The
' Curse of Artemisia,' consisting of the imprecations of Artemisia,
a woman against the father of her child, who has de-
serted her, written in an extremely archaic uncial hand.
The papyrus was found on the site of the Serapeum
at Memphis (though not with the papers of the recluse
Ptolemy, mentioned in the last chapter), and is now in the
Imperial Library at Vienna.^. It has been assigned by
Blass and Wessely to the fourth century b. c, by Thompson
to the early part of the third ; and there is no doubt that
the forms of the letters, recalling as they do those of
inscriptions upon stone, have a very early appearance.
The letters are stiff" and angular, with few curves; A
and E are of the square epigraphic shape, the latter
generally having the top horizontal stroke very long;
© is a circle enclosing a dot ( O ) ; O is small ; C is of a form
intermediate between the Z of the inscriptions and the C of
the papyri (C, (); GO retains much of the epigraphic form (u-i,
v^l) ; a colon is used for purposes of punctuation, as in in-
scriptions and a few early papyri. What militates against
the value of this document for palaeographical purposes
is its extremely rough and untrained appearance. It is
not the work of a professional scribe, but the writing
of an uneducated woman who uses uncial letters because
she can form no others. If Greek writing were at this
.period just issuing from the purely epigraphic stage, stress
might fairly be laid upon the use of epigraphic forms
as a proof of age ; but since we now know that men wrote
freely and easily upon papyrus long before this time, this
argument falls to the ground. Artemisia used letters like
those employed in inscriptions for the same reason that
an illiterate person always uses capitals, because such

' Facsimile in i\e Palaeographical Society's publications, vol. ii. pi.
141.

58 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

letters were commonly before her eyes in public places,
while she had probably seldom seen a book. It is on
evidence of a different character that the early date of this
document can alone be maintained. The traces of Ionic
dialect ('Apre/xio-t??, iKeTJjpiTj), the assimilation of the final
consonants of prepositions to the first letter of the following
word (kfj. iroa-fponn, iy yfji), and the occurrence of forms
of letters which are found not only in inscriptions but in
papyri known to belong to the third century, such as those
of e, 0, (0, described above, may be admitted as legitimate
evidence that this is a genuinely early document ; but it is
not one on which we could base any sound argument
as to the character of contemporary MSS,, if we had no
knowledge on this point from other sources of information.
The third Our knowledge of the literary palaeography of the third
cen ury century B. c. is based, in fact, entirely on the papyri
The Petrie discovered by Mr. Flinders Petrie in the mummy-cases
of Gurob, to which reference has already been made more
than once. Among them, in addition to the non-literary
documents described in the last chapter, were several
fragments of literary works; and it is a fair conclusion
that these are of about the same age as the non-literary
papers among which they were found. The argument
is, of course, not quite decisive. The papyri out of which
the Gurob cartonnages were made were, no doubt, waste
paper at the time when they were so used ; and it may be
questioned whether literary and non-literary documents
found in the same waste-paper basket are likely to be
of the same age. On the one hand it has been argued
that a well-written MS. of Plato or Euripides would
not be thrown away nearly so soon as mere business
papers of ephemeral interest, and hence that the fragments
here in question may easily be as early as the fourth
century. Against this it has been contended that such
documents as wills, leases, and receipts, which form the
titles to property, would probably be preserved for several

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 59

generations, while a copy of a literary work might be
thrown away at any time if it were found defective
or injured in any way. These arguments may perhaps
be allowed to neutralize one another. Titles to property
do not seem to have been preserved with the same tenacity
as in modern days, and were indeed unnecessary when
a register of ownership was kept by the government;
while, if some of the literary MSS. were of a period much
earlier than that at which they w«re converted into
mummy-cases, we should expect to find a perceptible
gradation of hands in the various fragments, some being
old while others were more recent. This is not the case
to any important extent; and we are therefore justified
in assigning the literary fragments among the Petrie
papyri to the same period as their non-literary companions,
namely to the third century.

To the Petrie fragments may now be added a few scraps
acquired by Mr. Grenfell in 1895-6, which, though bearing
no independent proof of their date, evidently belong to the
same period^- What we have, therefore, in all, as our
material for judging of the literary palaeography of the
third century, consists of the following: four columns of
the Antiope of Euripides^; a,bout twelve columns, besides
minor fragments, of the Phaedo of Plato ^; five columns
of the Laches of Plato*; and about a score of minute
fragments of various works °, all of them unknown with
the exception of a few pieces of Homer. Some of these,
however, can hardly be reckoned as literary hands. With
these, and with the evidence derivable from the non-literary

' Facs. in Grenfell, Greek Papyri, vol. ii. pi. i ; now in British Museum.

^ Facs. in Mahaffy, Flinders Petrie Papyri, part I. pll. i, ii ; now in British
Museum.

' Facs. ib., pll. v-viii ; partial facs. in Plate X and in Pal. Soc. vol. ii. 161 ;
now in British Museum.

* Facs., Mahaffy, part II. pll. xvii, xviii ; now in Bodleian Library.

° Facs., ib., part I. pll. iii, iv, ix, x, xxv; part II. pi. xvi; and Grenfell,
1. c. : now divided between the British Museum and the Bodleian.

6o PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

papyri of the same period, the history of writing during
the century has. to be reconstructed.

An examination of these texts shows, in the first place,
that they fall into two groups, one consisting of very
small hands, while the others are larger and present
generally a rougher appearance, apart from differences
in the formation of individual letters. The more impor-
tant, and also the best- written, texts are all in the smaller
hand, which may fairly be taken as representing the
writing in current use for books intended for public
circulation.. They include the Phaedo and, Antiope MSS.,
a few of the Petrie fragments, and all those of Mr. Grenfell.
The order of antiquity among them can only be deter-
mined by the more or less archaic appearance of the
writing. In the beginnings of writing on papyrus it
cannot be doubted that, in formally and carefully written
MSS., the shapes of the letters were nearly identical
with those in contemporaneous use in inscriptions; and
the greater or less occurrence of epigraphic forms, in
a MS., written, not by an uneducated person (as in the
case of the Artemisia, papyrus), but by a trained scribe,
may be taken as evidence- for a relatively earlier or
Early later date.. Applying this test, the earliest examples
ragments. a,mong the papyri now extant would seem to be (as
Mr. Mahaffy and Mr. Grenfell have already noticed) a frag-
ment of a prose narrative of the adventures of Heracles,
among the Petrie papyri ^, and two minute scraps among
Mr. Grenfell's. The most notably early among the forms
of letters in these fragments are the square E with broad
top ; with a central dot instead of a cross-stroke ; CO in its
transition forms, between H and w; and especially Z,
formed of three parallel horizontal bars with a perpen-

' An alphabet from this fragment is given by Mahaffy in his Flinders
Petrie Papyri, part I, p. 65 ; and an alphabet from the largest of Mr. Grenfell's
fragments forms col. i of the table given in Appendix I to this essay,
to which the reader may be referred for illustrations of the descriptions
of the individual letters which follow.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 6i

dicular stroke cutting them at right angles, and C in the
angular epigraphic shape. These last two characters belong
only to the Greni'ell fragments ; the Heracles fragment has
no example of a Z, and its C is semi-circular. Of the other
letters it is sufficient to observe that A is of the uncial
shape, like a modern capital A ; H is rather rounded
on both sides; "the two strokes composing A meet at the
top ; M is somewhat deeply curved in the Grenf ell fragment
and angular in the Heracles ; O is very small ; fl is rather
broad, with the right leg inclined to be shorter than
the other ; and Y is shaped as here printed. Not all these
letters are of value for determining the status of these
texts among other third-century, or even among Ptolemaic,
papyri; but it is necessary to note them for comparison
with the forms which came into existence in later periods.

Somewhat later than these fragments — perhaps about The
the middle of the third century — must be placed the two and An-
great treasures of Mr. Petrie's find, the Phaedo and the WopeMSS.
Antiope. In these cases we have some substantial part
of each MS. preserved, and are in a better position to
judge of their general appearance. The hand is not the
same in both, that of the Phaedo being noticeably better
and more careful; but in size and formation of letters
they are alike. The writing is extremely small, with
the object, no doubt, of making neat and handy volumes ;
the complete Antiope, supposing it to have been a play
of between 1400 and 1500 lines, would have occupied a roll
of about I a feet in length. Of the individual letters^,
A is of the uncial shape, in the Antiope sometimes (but not
always) approaching nearer to the epigraphic shape by
having the cross-bar bent downwards into an angle. The
Plato also sometimes has the square E with elongated top ;
but elsewhere in the Plato, and always in the Euripides,
the rounded form of the letter is found. Z (which does

' See alphabets in columns 2 and 3 of the table in Appendix I.

62 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

not occur in the earlier fragments described in the last
paragraph) has the form, peculiar to the third century,
of two parallel bars joined by a perpendicular stroke ;
has a cross-stroke, though it does not always accurately
fit the circle ; A and M are of the forms already described ;
Z is composed of three parallel and unconnected strokes,
and this, it will be found, is characteristic of the Ptolemaic
age alone, and forms a useful criterion for distinguishing
Ptolemaic MSS. Of the remaining letters, fl is very
broad in the Phaedo (it will be remembered that this
is a feature of third-century non-literary papyri), less
so in the Antiope ; C is small and rounded, the top some-
times slightly flattened ; CO is of the minuscule shape, the
second loop being often incompletely formed.

The beauty of these hands, and especially of the Plato,
has been eulogized in terms which are, perhaps, somewhat
exaggerated; not unnaturally, since, in the state of our
knowledge at the time of their discovery, it was a surprise
to find writing of so early a date which showed such
freedom of style, combined with so much orderliness
and precision. Both Mr. MahaSy and Sir E. Thompson
speak of the Plato, in particular, as a MS. of extreme
beauty. Now that the first joy of discovery has worn off,
it seems evident that they are not the equals of the best
specimens of the Roman period, or even, it may be, of the
later Ptolemaic age. There is a general appearance of
neatness about these small, yet firm, hands; but there
are considerable inequalities in size among the letters,
which would be more noticeable if they were written
on a larger scale, and they lack the handsomeness of the
larger hands which came into favour later. The Antiope
MS., indeed, hardly achieves the praise of neatness, being
decidedly rough and irregular in places, besides being more
compressed than the Plato. It cannot be supposed that
this is a fair example of the volumes preserved in the
great Alexandrian library, though it may represent the

Plvte X.

-.*«

^-Th] "?

*\»V'Tr^K r f,t

r "* /x ■ ^ ' '

'i-f

5rc- •,•»<.-

,H v--j.|^ ^^ ^..^j-^-r-ij ^^ ^(^^v.. . -■

•- f'%.-^ —p ■')fr-«^f,-« f.v ">■£.*''"'' ^ ^ ' -»--/naiv".

w

"-i

,_ >r' KA'f-"^

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«*^r=-

^f>- ~

- -?.;-('

-3"

>'.

.^

PLATO, PHAEDO.- 3RD CENT. B.C.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 63

style which would pass muster in the book-shops. Nor
do the texts come up to the Alexandrian standard of
accuracy. How far they fall short is a question to which
the answer depends on the solution of the critical problem
as to the authenticity of certain readings which depart
from the vulgate; but apart from these there are more
obvious blunders than can have been admitted in the great
libraries which handed down, in most cases, such pure
texts to the vellum MSS. of the tenth and later cen-
turies, on which our present knowledge of the classical
authors is based. Yet, with all these deductions, the
Phaedo and Antiope papyri have a great attractiveness
of appearance, and rank high among papyrus MSS.
of any age ; nor would any one deny their extreme value
for the history of Greek writing. With their aid we can
not only realize how Greek books were written in the days
of the early Ptolemies, but can, by a legitimate use of
inference and imagination, picture to ourselves the contents
of the book-shops of Athens in the times of Menander and
Demosthenes, perhaps even of Aristophanes and Sophocles.
Between the literary hands which have hitherto been
described, and the non-literary hands of the same period,
there is no very marked resemblance. Some of the letters,
such as n and Z, and to a less extent M, T, and Y, would
be recognized as Ptolemaic in style, but it would be
very difficult to assign these MSS., on palaeographical
grounds alone, to the same period as the non-literary
documents which bear dates in the reigns of the early
Ptolemies. There is, however, another type of hand to
which this statement applies much less fuUy. Several
of the literary MSS. among the Petrie papyri are
in larger hands, approximating to those of the con-
temporary non-literary documents. Chief among these The
are the fragments of the Laches of Plato, now at Oxford, M^s^'^and
the curious scrap of Homer containing several additional others,
verses, the fragments of the Mouseion of Alcidamas and

64 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

another rhetorical treatise ^. The other classical fragments
published by Prof. Mahafiy likewise belong to this category,
but they are so small, and in some cases approach so
closely to the non-literary hand, that they can hardly
be taken into account. In this class of hands, while
the uncial forms of some letters, such as A, H, K, N, are
preserved, and the straggling appearance of the non-literary
hands is avoided, the writing on the whole is recognizably
akin to the non-literary type. The letters are larger
and squarer than in the Phaedo and Antiope; 6, Cx), and
in some cases M, are definitely of the minuscule form ;
and the writing is without the style and attractiveness
— due, no doubt, to greater care — which characterize the
smaller hands described above. The MSS. of this larger
type cannot be regarded as having been intended for
sale or general circulation. They are rather the work
of ordinary scribes, employing a somewhat modified
form of the current handwriting of the day, which they
have adapted for literary purposes by reducing its excessive
breadth and cursiveness, making it squarer and firmer,
without, however, achieving much of beauty or regularity.

The For the second century b. C. materials are, at present,

century very scarce. There has been no great discovery of
documents of this period, comparable to the Petrie ' find ' ;
and the principal groups of non-literary material which
have come to light — the Serapeum papyri for the first
half of the century and Messrs. Hogarth and Grenfell's
papyri for the second half — contribute between them only
one MS. which can in any way be classed as literary. In
addition to this single MS. there is also one isolated
discovery belonging to this period, which is of considerable
interest. Both MSS. are now in the Louvre, the last-
mentioned, a recent acquisition, being the famous oration
of Hyperides against Athenogenes — one of the orator's

' Petrie Papyri, part I, nos. lo, 25.

B. 0.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 65

masterpieces — while the other, acquired at a much earlier
date, is a dialectical treatise containing quotations from
a number of classical authors, such as Sappho, Alcman,
Ibycus, Homer, and Euripides. Both MSS. are shown
to be not later than the second century B.C. by the
existence of writing on their backs belonging to the
Ptolemaic period ; while neither of them shows any such
marked resemblance to the Petrie papyri as would justify
the assignment of them to the third century. The
dialectical treatise must, however, belong to the first
half of the second century at latest, since the writing
on its verso is dated in the year 160 B.C. For the
Hyperides the only evidence we have to go upon is the
statement of Prof. E. Revillout, its first editor, that it
bears on its verso accounts in demotic, belonging to the
Ptolemaic period. No more precise indication of their
date has been given; but this is sufficient to show that
the text of the oration can hardly be later than the
second century, while certain resemblances between its
writing and that of MSS. belonging to the following
century seem to make it probable that it belongs to the
second half of the century rather than the first. From
only two MSS., and these exhibiting very different types
of writing, it is obviously dangerous to draw any very .
sweeping conclusions as to the literary palaeography of the
period; but they serve to bridge over the gulf between
two periods for which our information is more complete.

The dialectical fragment ^ is written in narrow columns The Paris
of about two inches in breadth, leaning (as in several Fragment,
other early papyri) strongly to the right. Divisions in
the sense are marked by slight spaces in the writing,
and by paragraphi below the beginnings of the lines in
which the pauses occur. The hand is small, though not

' Complete facsimile (not photographic) in the Album to Notices et
Extraits, plate xi ; photographic facsimile of three columns in Pal. Soc. ii.
180, and of one column in Plate XI. Alphabet in Appendix I, col. 4.

F

66 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

so minute as those of the Phaedo and Antlope; it is
evidently to be regarded as the lineal successor of these
hands. The most noticeable modification in general form
is a tendency to roundness and curved forms of letters.
In this respect a transitional form may be found in a
small fragment discovered and published by Mr. Grenfell ^
The letters are also more even and uniform in size; and
in many of their forms they approximate to some of
the MSS. found at Herculaneum, which must be at
least a century later. Of the individual letters, A is the
most noticeable, as giving the first example of a form
found in some other early papyri. It is a modification
of the uncial form, the original left-hand stroke and the
cross-bar being formed together into the shape of a sort
of vpedge {i.), across the open end of vphich the right-hand
stroke is drawn, generally in a curve (a). It is an inter-
mediate form between the uncial (A) and the fully
developed minuscule (d^), which can be written without
raising the pen. Another letter which shows a transitional
form is Z, in which the middle stroke is neither perpendicular
as in the Petrie MSS., nor drawn obliquely from end to
end of the horizontal strokes as in later papyri, but is
intermediate between these two forms. H and K are
strongly curved. A is noticeable for its right-hand stroke
in some cases (but not in all) being carried beyond the
point of junction; again a sign of transition, since this
is generally characteristic of late Ptolemaic and Roman
MSS. Z is still decidedly Ptolemaic, being formed of three
distinct strokes, the middle one of which is very small;
so also is n, which generally retains its breadth. C is
well rounded ; and the curve of Y is more strongly marked
than before. The other letters have no peculiarities that
need be noticed. The general aspect of the writing is
neat and graceful ; less strong than the best third-century
hands, but somewhat more ornamental.
' Qreek Papyri, ii. pi. i, no. a ; now Pap. ncLxxxixa in the British Museum.

Plate XI.

J . . . ■ " I

■M .n:>./

I

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c-^>4 o Y-j-'^^^Aj-f <r <> K w.-<

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T>r>i./ 0'Y^fsf-Aj<ji'ctvT>roY'
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I ay ^^>£AA.-c'3^;JJa.■<.Df^;XAeJt»-Tof

DIALECTICAL TREATISE. — 2ND CENT. B.C.

Plate XII.

■■'':;~^^^--- 4^

r,^- - .-

■^ '-J «t*<>^ /^Q'T'^fnP A^^^/hAT©/ ONt«JH'/^' ^ :^^^

HYPERIDES I.\ ATHEiNOGENEM. — 2.\D CENT. B.C.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 67

The Louvre Hyperides^ presents a very diflferent The
appearance from its colleague. If the main characteristics Hyper-
of the latter are grace and roundness, those of the ides.
Hyperides are strength and squareness. The columns
are broad and upright, instead of being narrow and
sloping. The letters are firm and noticeably square in
appearance, besides being larger than those of the dialectical
treatise. The uncial forms of such letters as A, H, M, are
retained, and all the characters are fully and carefully
formed. This MS. is, in fact, the first example of
a phenomenon which runs all through the history of
literary papyri, namely the retention of a fully developed
uncial form of writing side by side with hands in which
a certain concession to the cursive style is discernible.
The dialectical treatise is an example of this intermixture
of the cursive element, while the Hyperides rejects it.
It is obviously more difficult to assign dates to the strict
uncial hands, which approach the epigraphic style rather
than that of non-literary documents; but there are some
letters on which dependence may generally be placed.
In the present instance, Ptolemaic characteristics are
Tmmistakably to be found in A, the right-hand stroke
of which projects very slightly, or not at all, above the
point of junction; in M, which has a shallow, angular
depression ; in the three unconnected strokes of Z ; and
(less distinctively) in the Y-shaped form of Y. Of the
other letters it need only be' noted that A and A have
the peculiarity of a short projecting stroke above the
apex; that Z sometimes has its down-stroke drawn to
the middle of the lower bar, instead of to its left-hand
end; and that € has the cross-bar rather high, while the
upper curve is carried well over, so as nearly or quite

' Complete facsimile with printed text, edited hy E. Eevillout (1893) ;
one column in Byperides, the Orations against Athenogenes and PhUippides,
edited hy F. G. Kenyon; another in Plate XII. Alphabet in
Appendix I, col. 5.

F 2

68 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

to meet it again. The general appearance of the hand
is attractive and imposing, and, although less economical
of space than the minute hands of the Phaedo and Antiope,
it has good claims to be considered a more handsome style
of writing. It is, moreover, very distinct, and therefore a
valuable medium for the safe transmission of literary texts.
The Passing from this, the finest example of second-century

niad. calligraphy, there are two other literary papyri of the
same period which deserve a brief mention. The first
of these is a fragment containing a small portion of the
eleventh book of the Iliad, in which, as in the Petrie
fragment mentioned above, there are some additional
verses which are not found in the vulgate. The papyrus
is at Geneva, and the text has been published by Prof.
Nicole, who, however, does not assign any date to it.
From a fascimile, however, published by Prof. Diels',
it is clear that it belongs to the second century B.C.,
being written, in fact, not in a literary hand at all, but
in a reduced form of the common non-literary hand
which meets us in the Serapeum papyri^- The question
as to the character of the enlarged text contained in it
does not come within the scope of the present essay;
though it may be observed that this is the latest example
of such a text which has yet come to light. Some
additional specimens of it have lately been acquired by
Mr. Grenfell, but they, like the Petrie fragment, belong
to the third century B.C.
Tiie Erotic The other literary papyrus alluded to above is the
ragment. fragmg^^ of a_ mime, written either in rhythmical prose
or in lyrical verse without strophic correspondences (for
scholars differ), recently published by Mr. Grenfell ^ This

' Sitzungsberichte der k. pt-evssischen Akademie, 1894, no. xix.

' It is the more necessary to record the date of this MS., because Prof.
Mahaffy, in a moment of aberration , has assigned it to the second century
after Christ.

' Greek Papyri, vol. i. {An Alexandrian Erotic Fragment), no. i. Now Brit.
Mus. Pap. Dcv verso.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 69

unquestionably belongs to the second century B.C., but
is written in a non-literary hand, and therefore does not
require separate treatment here. It is inscribed on the
verso of a document dated 173 B.C., in a small cursive
hand.

There are other papyri which have sometimes been con-
jecturally assigned to the second century B.C., notably
two of the British Museum MSS. of Hyperides ; but in
the pages which follow these MSS. have been referred to
other periods, and wiU not be discussed until we arrive
at the dates to which, according to the evidence now
available, they appear to belong.

From the scantiness of evidence which is thus seen
to be available, it is impossible to formularize any very
dogmatic conclusions as to the literary palaeography of
the second century b. c. ; especially as the two MSS. which
form the principal sources 8f our knowledge exhibit very
different types of writing. It is fortunate, however,
that the approximate dates of these two MSS. are estab-
lished with more certainty than usual, by the writings
which each has upon its verso. We are thus in possession
of fixed points from which other examples may be dealt
with ; and in approaching the doubtful period which follows
next such fixed points are very valuable.

The first century B.C. is, indeed, a period which requires The first
careful handling and little dogmatism, both because several 3^°. ""^^
interesting MSS. have been assigned to it with various
degrees of doubtfulness, and because it contains the
transition from the Ptolemaic to the Roman periods.
A special element of complexity is introduced by the
Herculaneum papyri, which, from their character and
the circumstances of their preservation, must necessarily
belong either to this century or the next, and which, for
the first and last time, carry the range of available
evidence beyond the borders of Egypt. There are a few
fixed points which mark out the stages of the inquiry.

70 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

and round these the attempt must be made to group
the other documents which, on palaeographical grounds
alone, appear to belong to the period.
TlieHer- The Herculaneum papyri, with which it will be con-
plpyri"" venient to deal first, raise a question which has not
yet been discussed, namely how far the history of palaeo-
graphy in Egypt applies to the Greek-writing world
outside. The question cannot be fully answered, for
want of sufficient materials ; but it can be answered
sufficiently for all practical purposes. The analogy of
mediaeval Latin MSS. shows that the distinctions be-
tween contemporary MSS. written in different countries
are less than those between MSS. written in the same
country but at the distance of a century or so of time.
It requires more experience to determine the country of
a MS. than its date. There is no reason to doubt
that the same would be the case with Greek writing on
papyrus; on the contrary, there is the more reason to
expect uniformity, since all Greek MSS., in whatever
country, would be written either by Greeks or by those
who had learnt their writing from Greeks. We have,
in fact, practically the same conditions as prevailed in
the Greek minuscule writing of the late Middle Ages. It
may be possible for special experience sometimes to dis-
tinguish Greek MSS. written in Italy from those written
in Greece and Constantinople, but it is not necessary to
possess this special knowledge in order to assign the date
of a MS. with sufficient accuracy.

When, therefore, we find that the papyri discovered
at Herculaneum, though not exactly like any of the
Egyptian papyri, yet do not differ from them more than
they differ among themselves, and possess strong re-
semblances both in general appearance and in particular
detail, there need be no hesitation in applying to them
the same criteria of age as to their Egyptian relatives.
No doubt there may have been local distinctions, which

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 71

fuller evidence might enable us to discern ; and certain
features may have continued longer or less long in
Alexandria or in Rome; but this range of uncertainty
is no greater than that which applies to the whole
subject of supplying conjectural dates to undated MSS.,
and in practice may be ignored. It may, however,
be worth while to bear in mind that Greek writing was
an exotic among the Romans, while it was naturalized
in Egypt ; hence it is likely that changes in the prevalent
styles of writing began rather in Alexandria than in
Rome, so that possibly MSS. written in Italy may be
slightly later in date than MSS. showing the same
characteristics written in Egypt. Since, however, the copy-
ists of Greek manuscripts written in Italy were almost
certainly Greeks themselves, not much weight need be
attached to this argument.

It seems, therefore, perfectly legitimate to use the Their
Herculaneum papyri as evidence for the palaeography ^ ®'
of MSS. written in Egypt ; and the point is of consider-
able importance, since the date of the Herculaneum
volumes can be fixed with fair accuracy. The tervninus
ante quern is absolute, being the eruption of Vesuvius
in A.D. 79, which overwhelmed the town and calcined
the papyri. The terminus a quo is supplied by the
fact that many of the papyri contain works of the
Epicurean philosopher, Philodemus, who was a contem-
porary of Cicero ; while nearly all the rest are either
copies of the works of Epicurus or treatises of a philo-
sophical character. Now Philodemus was not a very
eminent philosopher, and it is not likely that a large
collection of his works would be made at any time much
after his death ; and the fact that several of his treatises
are here represented in duplicate suggests the probability
that the collection was made by Philodemus himself ^. This

' See Scott, Fragmenta Herculanensia, pp. i r, la.

72 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

would assign the MSS. to the first century B.C., and
to dates before, rather than after, B.C. 50. This con-
clusion is not invalidated by the fact that a Latin
poem on the battle of Actium and the Egyptian campaign
of Augustus was found along with the Greek papyri, since it
may easily have been added by a later owner of the library.
On the other hand, this poem is itself not at all likely to
have been written later than the reign of Augustus, and
therefore suppHes a proof that the library was not of
recent formation at the time of the catastrophe of A.D. 79.
A philosophical library of the preceding century may
very well have been kept together in the house of its
original owner, just as libraries of eighteenth-century
theology may be found in country houses nowadays,
even though some of the authors are somewhat out of
date. There is, therefore, no ground for rejecting the
natural inference from the character of the library itself,
to the effect that the volumes composing it were written
shortly before the middle of the first century b. c.

The Herculaneum papyri consequently belong to the
end of the Ptolemaic period of Greek palaeography; for
it will be convenient to retain the name, although it is
something of a misnomer when applied to MSS. written
outside Egypt. Indeed, as has been briefly indicated in
an earlier chapter, the names 'Ptolemaic,' 'Roman,'
' Byzantine,' must be applied much less rigidly to literary
than to non-literary papyri. Changes of dynasty, im-
plying changes of influence and the introduction of clerks
and officials of different origins, may very naturally affect
the handwriting of official, and through them of private,
documents to a very noticeable extent; but the writers
of books belong to a society which extends beyond the
borders of a single kingdom, and would not consciously
submit to the influence of an official chancellery. Hence,
on the one hand, the changes in literary papyri at the
advent of the Romans in Egypt are less obviously recog-

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 73

nizable ; on the other hand, they may be taken as applying
generally to Athens and Rome as well as to Alexandria.
In speaking of any Egyptian papyrus, written in a formal
book-hand, as ' Ptolemaic,' we mean only that it is written
in a hand prevalent in Greek literary circles during the
period when the Ptolemies ruled in Egypt, with, perhaps,
some slight local modifications due to the fact that the
scribe was writing in Egypt; and similarly, in speaking
of papyri written at Herculaneum as Ptolemaic, we mean
that they are written in the Greek book-hand prevalent
during this same period, even though the slight local
influences were in this case Italian and not Egyptian.

The conclusion that the Herculaneum papyri are to be Test
referred to the end of the Ptolemaic period suits perfectly ^*^^^^t
with what we know from other sources of the course of
palaeographical development, and they thus drop easily
into a natural place in the sequence. In all crucial details
they answer to the criteria which serve to distinguish
Ptolemaic from Eoman papyri; and the history of Greek
palaeography remains natural and intelligible on this theory,
which it is not if they are referred to a date a century
or more later. The two letters which are of most decisive
importance at this stage are A and Z. The uncial form of
the former letter (A) does, indeed, as has been stated above,
run through all periods, and is found alike in Ptolemaic
and Roman MSS. ; but the minuscule form is different
in the two periods. In literary papyri of the Ptolemaic
age the right-hand oblique stroke is always formed sepa-
rately from the rest of the letter, which is written without
lifting the pen, having either an acute angle or a loop in
the left-hand corner (^, ^, cA, A). In Roman papyri,
on the other hand, the A is almost always written in one
piece, just as in cursive MSS. ( J-, ^). There are exceptions,
as in the case of the Bankes Homer (Brit. Mus. Pap. cxiv) ;
but they are few, and the rule will generally be found
serviceable, except in the cases where the uncial form of

74 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI '

the letter is retained. The second test letter is still more
valuable, being liable to no such exception as that juat
mentioned. It is, of course, rash to rely absolutely on the
form of a single letter as an infallible test of date, especially
where evidence is so scanty as it is in the case of literary
papyri; but so far as the evidence goes at present, Z in
Ptolemaic MSS. is invariably formed of three disconnected
strokes \ while in Roman MSS. it is equally invariably
formed in one continuous whole. This rule at present holds
good absolutely, though in paleographical matters isolated
exceptions to any rule may always come to light.

According to both these tests, the Herculaneum papyri
fall within the Ptolemaic period. They include, as might
be expected, several different hands, but most of them
exhibit the same general type ^ ; and in respect of these
special letters there is little variation. A is normally of
the minuscule type, formed in two strokes ; in a few cases,
such as the MS. of Philodemus De Ira, it is of the uncial
shape ; but never, apparently, of the Roman type, written
without lifting the pen at all. The evidence of Z is equally
clear and unanimous, the letter being regularly formed
of three distinct strokes. The only variation is that in
some cases the central stroke is a horizontal line (shorter
than the two others), while elsewhere it has the shape
of a comma (Z, X). In one MS.^, if the facsimile (which
is not good) is to be trusted, the central stroke does
indeed touch and connect the two others (i); but the
exception is more apparent than real, since the letter

' One of Mr. Grenfell's fragments, described above (p. 45) has the three
strokes connected by a perpendicular line at right angles to them (i) ; but
this is a still more archaic form, and does not in any way invalidate the
principle here enunciated.

2 See facsimiles in Scott's Fragmenia Herculanemia ; Thirty- six Engravings of
Textsand Alphabets from tte ffej-cMtomeMTO-FrajfOTenfe (ed. Nicholson, Oxford 1891) ;
Pal. Son. i. 151, 152 ; and a series of photographs issued by the Oxford
Philological Society, in several volumes. Alphabet in App. I, col. 7, below.

^ Scott's Pap. 26.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 75

is still formed by three distinct strokes of the pen, the
only difference being that the central comma-shaped stroke
is large enough to touch both the upper and the lower
horizontal line.

In general appearance the Herculaneum hands are
small and graceful, having affinities with the Louvre
dialectical fragment described above, rather than with the
larger and squarer type of the Louvre Hyperides. A, as
will be seen from the above description, is not unlike the
same letter in the dialectical papyrus ; € is generally well
rounded, and the central stroke has a tendency to be
separated from the rest of the letter; the two strokes
of A are generally united at the top, but sometimes the
right-hand stroke is prolonged; M is Ptolemaic, having
an angular centre instead of the deep rounded curves of
the Koman period ; fl is fairly broad ; Y is of the Y-shape,
but without any strong individuality. All these details
tend to confirm . the assignment of these papyri to the
end of the Ptolemaic period, and assist in giving fullness
and precision to our knowledge of its palaeographical
characteristics.

The Herculaneum papyri having thus been assigned T}ie
to their place, two other MSS. must be mentioned which jj^^g ^^'
likewise seem to belong to the earlier half of the first Papyrus,
century B. c. The first of these is the recently discovered
MS. containing the poems of BacchyHdes^. This has
strong Ptolemaic features; but something in its general
appearance, as well as some details which it has in
common with later MSS., indicates that it probably
belongs to the end of the period, about the middle of the
first century b. c. It is in a handsome hand, of good size,
clear and firm, and carefully written. It evidently belongs
to the class of MSS. written for sale or for preservation

' Complete facsimile published by the Trustees of the British Museum.
One column is reproduced in Plate XIII, and an alphabet given in App. I,
col. 6.

76 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

in a public library, and ranks high among the extant
specimens of Greek calligraphy upon papyrus. Its columns
are wide (about 5 inches), their size being determined by
the length of the longest of the irregular verses in which
the odes are written. Of the individual letters, A is con-
spicuously angular, without a vestige of a curve, and
formed in two strokes of the pen, (A, 1k); € is narrow,
with a long projecting central stroke ; Z has the peculiarity
of often having the lower horizontal stroke separate from
the rest of the letter; A shows a slight projection of the
right-hand stroke, which may be taken as an indication
of the approach of the Eoman period ; M, on the other hand,
is decidedly Ptolemaic, being a broad letter with a shallow
curve; Z, too, is quite Ptolemaic, and the central bar is
generally reduced to a mere point, while the other strokes
are unusually long ; is small ; fl is broad ; C is narrow,
and the upper part of it is often separated from the rest,
a phenomenon which recurs in the Harris Homer, to be
described in the next chapter ; T has its cross-stroke longer
on the left than on the right ; Y has a very shallow curve ;
CO is broad and shallow, with little or no traces of the
central stroke. Some of the titles of poems have been
added in a different hand, which is plainly of Roman
type, and probably not earlier than the second century;
but these are so clearly a later addition, being omitted in
some instances, and showing quite distinct forms of letters,
that they give no clue to the date of the original writing 1.

' The date here assigned to the Bacohylides papyrus is questioned
by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt {Oxyrhymhua Papyri, i. 53), who would place
it in the first or second century after Christ, partly on the strength
of a papyrus of Demosthenes published by them, which (having accounts
on the verso in a second-century hand) they assign to the early part of the
second century. The resemblance between that papyi-us and the Bacohy-
lides, however, is not very great, and to my eye the Demosthenes appears
decidedly later. None of the most characteristic letters of the Bacchylides
{ji, f, V, w) has the same shape in the Demosthenes. Personally I should
put the Demosthenes fragment somewhat earlier than they do, regarding
the cursive writing on the verso as of the middle of the second century,

Plate XIII.

, -^z ^j^"^ A *^_^ -i> >^ -js / AA+:>s^i Yf >.f ^^+0 *«Jt^
-j' ^ p I- { T f'H' ^"^ "' "^^ r iT {• "^

n p c- n f-K ^^> i-f T'^^^*^ '^^*^

X.^UH^ t-'2i:i»X'»Hrt-f/^c'

~rf H M ;^ r ^•^ f ^ "^ ' ' T"" -^^ I o fs>< o oT t''^ :

o"-y>^ r«» h^ <> f-l M A-c f fc >- {-n * >^'''"'

BACCHYLIDES— 1ST CENT. B.C.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 77

The remaining MS. to be noticed is that which contains Hyperides
the oration of Hyperides against Philippides and the third phuii^i-
Epistle of Demosthenes (Brit. Mus. Papp. cxxxiii, cxxxiy) ^ <^«»»'.
These two compositions, written on a single roll of papyrus,
are in quite diflferent hands, both of them rather peculiar
and noticeable. The Hyperides is written in small, very
graceful letters, well-rounded, with ligatures as distinctly
marked and carefully written as the letters themselves,
and in exceptionally narrow columns. The Demosthenes
is in yet smaller letters — indeed there is no other literary

and the Demosthenes as of the first century ; which would allow of the
Bacchylldes remaining where I have placed it above, at the transition
from the Ptolemaic to the Roman style in the first century E. 0. Messrs.
Grenfell and Hunt further state that the forms of ix and v which appear
in the Bacchylides are also found in two of their papyri of the Eoman
period, the Aristoxenus and Thucydides fragments ; but the li in both
these MSS. is quite different, being of only ordinary breadth and much
more deeply indented, and the v, though shallow in the top, does not very
closely resemble the same letter in the Bacchylides. On the whole, the
Oxyrhynchus papyri, which are all of the Roman period, seem to me to con-
firm the date here assigned to the Bacchylides. Prof. Blass (Bacchylidis
Carmina, 1898, pp. vii, viii) assigns the Bacchylides MS. to the first century
after Christ rather than to the previous centuiy, on grounds not of
palaeography but of orthography, especially its comparative freedom from
iotacism. His argument is that (according to the evidence of inscriptions)
under the earliest emperors the interchange of ei and 1 was carried to an
extreme, while in the course of the first century a reform in this respect
was introduced, culminating in the second century under the influence of
Herodian. In the absence, however, of more manuscript evidence on the
point than is at present available, this argument is somewhat precarious.
It is certain that in non -literary papyri the interchange of « and i is quite
as common in the first and second centuries after Christ as in the Ptolemaic
period, and it is clear that much must have depended on the practice of
individual scribes. A well- written MS., such as the Bacchylides, copied
from an earlier MS. free from iotacism, would not be likely to be affected
by it to any serious extent, certainly not to any extent comparable to
inscriptions or non-literary papyri in which the scribe had no earlier copy
to follow. Under these circumstances, the evidence of orthograpliy seems
much too doubtful to be accepted as the main guide to the date of a MS. ;
and the fact that this evidence leads Prof. Blass to assign the Herodas
papyrus to the Ptolemaic age may be taken as reinfoi-cing this conclusion
(see below, pp. 94, 95).

' Specimen facsimiles in Classical Texts from Papyri in the British Museum,
ed. F. Gr. Kenyon (1891), plates ii and iii. Alphabets in App. I, cols. 7 and 8.

78 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

papyrus in which the characters are so small — more angular
and less well formed. The columns of both lean decidedly
to the right. In detail the letters are akin to those of
the Herculaneum papyri, and it is on the strength of
this comparison that the MS. is assigned to the first
century B.C. In the Hyperides, A has the loop in the
left-hand corner which has been noticed in the Herculaneum
papyri (and in an incipient form in the Louvre dialectical
fragment), the right-hand stroke being made separately ;
A is formed in a very similar way, but the loop does not
fall below the rest of the letter ; € is well rounded, with
the cross-stroke rather high; A shows some projection
of the right-hand stroke ; K is deeply curved, a sign of the
approach of the Roman style ; Z is Ptolemaic, with three
distinct strokes; C is well rounded; Y is deeply curved,
much as in the reign of Augustus ; CO is fully and carefully
Demo- formed. The Demosthenes has many of its details very
Ep. III! similar, but is less well written throughout. A varies
between the uncial form and the form with the loop in the
left-hand corner; some shapes of the latter show the
approach of the Roman type, but the letter is still written
in two strokes ; € is small and narrow ; A sometimes has
the right-hand stroke projecting, sometimes not; M is
generally shallow, recalling the Ptolemaic type ; Z has its
three separate strokes ; C has rather a flat top ; Y resembles
the same letter in the Bacchylides papyrus ; and Ci) is only
slightly formed, the second loop being often hardly visible.
It will be seen from a consideration of these features, and
especially of such test letters as A, M, and Z, that both
hands of this MS. are on the border line between the
Ptolemaic and the Roman periods. Some forms are still
distinctly Ptolemaic, while others are already approaching
the types which will be seen in the next chapter to belong
to the Roman style. They stand or fall with the papyri
of Herculaneum, and cannot be placed very far from them
in point of time.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD 79

With these MSS., therefore, we reach the end of the
Ptolemaic period, which may be roughly fixed at the
middle of the first century b. c. Such precise definitions
of time are, however, only useful as aids to the memory,
and it is as well to repeat the caution that no precise
accuracy can be expected in the dating of literary
papyri in the present state of our knowledge. Palaeo-
graphical periods necessarily melt into one another, and
the forms of letters have no precise boundaries. Even
where materials are much more plentiful, as in the minus-
cule MSS. of the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, it
is only necessary to look at the published series of dated
facsimiles from MSS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale, to have
any rash dogmatism checked by the recognition of the fact
that types of hands run on much further than is commonly
allowed for. Dating MSS. by palaeographical indications
alone is, to a considerable extent, a science of conventions.
We can say that such and such a MS. is written in a hand
which was prevalent in, say, the first century ; but we can
much less confidently affirm that it was itself certainly
written in that century. Still, it is only by provisional
generalizations that science progresses ; and this is as true
of palaeography as of physics or chemistry. The crystal-
lization of isolated observations into formulas may lead
to some mistakes, but it also leads to progress, by the
confirmation or rejection of the formulas; and so this
mapping out of the province of Ptolemaic palaeography
will, it may fairly be hoped, be of some use for the
arrangement and systematization of existing knowledge,
and as an aid towards the assimilation of the knowledge
which future discoveries may bring in. The criteria which
have been indicated in the course of this chapter meet,
it is believed, all the data which are now forthcoming, and
arrange them in an intelligible series; but their final
verification, or otherwise, must come from the evidence
which the spade of the explorer has still to bring to light.

CHAPTER V

LTTEKAEY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD.

The Roman period is, in relation to non-literary papyri,
the period concerning which we have the fullest and the
most precisely dated evidence ; but the same cannot be said
of it in respect of literary MSS. In mere number, indeed,
the literary documents of the Roman period exceed those
of the Ptolemaic; but it happens that hardly any of
them can be even approximately dated upon independent
grounds. Consequently there has been great uncertainty
as to the dates assigned to many of the MSS. with which
we have to deal in this chapter; and it would be rash
to say that the period of uncertainty is yet at an end.
Any day some fresh piece of evidence may be brought
to light which will modify the conclusions to which we can
now come; and all statements which rest solely on the
impression produced by a MS. itself, without collateral
evidence connecting it with better established knowledge,
must be taken as only approximate.

We have seen, at the close of the preceding chapter,
the progress of the transition which leads from the
Ptolemaic to the Roman age, and have found it exempli-
fied chiefly by the papyri from Herculaneum. Speaking
generally, the characteristics which distinguish the Roman
period from its predecessor are (i) a greater roundness and
smoothness in the forms of letters, and (a) a somewhat
larger average size. The very small hands which occur

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 8i

in so many — and those often the best written — of the
Ptolemaic MSS. do not recur ; it is rather the characters of
such papyri as the Louvre Hyperides and the Bacchylides
that set the pattern for the Koman period. And letters
which are prevailingly straight or angular in the earlier
period, such as A, M, Z, are now rounded off into curves ;
while letters like 6 and C, which were rounded before,
become more rounded now.

Before coming to a definitely dated MS. which shows
the characteristics of the Roman style fully established,
there are one or two papyri to be mentioned, in which
the remains of Ptolemaic influence seem to be visible.
One of these is a fragmentary roll of the last two books Homer,
of the Iliad, now in the British Museum ^- It is written xxiv''"''
in a hand of fair size, somewhat square in shape, with
thin, firm strokes. The i adscript is regularly written,
which is a sign of a relatively early date ; and there are
no breathings, accents, or marks of elision by the first
hand. There are, however, some of the critical symbols
(the hmXfi and asterisk) employed by Aristarchus, of which
this MS. provides the earliest examples as yet extant.
In form several of the letters show distinctly Eoman
characteristics. A is formed in a single stroke, with
a curved body, though there are also signs of the older
angular shape; M is deeply curved; £ and C are well
rounded, the former having the cross-bar high ; the right-
hand stroke of A projects considerably; and Z is of the
Roman type, formed continuously. On the other hand
Y has the shallow top which appears also in the Bacchylides
and Demosthenes ; and this, along with the somewhat tran-
sitional form of A and the generally early aspect of the
writing as a whole, seems to justify the attribution of the
MS. to the latter half of the first century B. c.

' Pap. cxxTiii ; collation, with specimen facsimile, in Classical Tens from
Greek Papyri ; complete text in Journal of Philology, xxi. 296. Alphabet in
App. I, col. 10.

G

82

PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

The

Louvre

Alcman.

Brit. Mus.
Pap.

OCOLIV.

Another MS., of less palaeographical, but greater literary,
interest, which has sometimes been assigned to the Ptole-
maic period, is the fragment of Alcman, now in the Louvre ^.
As containing some otherwise unknown lines of this lyric
poet, it is a papyrus of considerable value : but it is not
a regular literary MS., being roughly written in a non-
literary hand. This hand is, no doubt, a fairly early one,
but there seems to be no reason for placing it earlier than
the Christian era. All the test letters are of the rounded
Roman type; while Y has the deep curve and the tail
bending far to the right, which are characteristic of the
non-literary hands of the first half (and especially the first
quarter) of the first century. The fragment may be of
the reign of Augustus, but, if so, it belongs to the last
years of that emperor.

We are fortunate in possessing a MS. which enables
us to fix the exact state of palaeographical development
which had been reached at the beginning of the Christian
era. This is Pap. gccliv of the British Museum, a docu-
ment of non-literary character, but written in a careful
and most elaborate book-hand, and capable of being
precisely dated ^- It is a petition for redress of injuries,
addressed to the prefect of Egypt, Gains Turranius. This
officer is known from an inscription {G. I. G. iii. 4923),
which contains a date in the reign of Augustus; and
though the date is somewhat mutilated, and has been
differently read by different scholars, it is certain that
it corresponds to either 15, 10, or 7 B.C. The difference
between these dates is quite immaterial for palaeographical
purposes, and we thus have a definitely fixed date for the
type of hand shown in this MS. It is a hand of great
beauty, of medium size, regularly and firmly written, with

' Facs. in atlas to Notices et Exiraits, pi. 1.

" Facs. in the atlas to vol. ii. of Greek Papyri in the British Museum, and
a partial facs. (showing best-preserved part; in Plate XIV. Alphabet in
App. I, coL II.

Plate XIV.

|*>eiXKf }^k>^u3 ^Ml H^? JOiJ^ ceWt;^ :^nrrT;W c jt

PETITION.— CirC. B.C. lO.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 83

graceful and well-formed strokes and curves. There are,
perhaps, no better written papyri in existence than this
and the MS. to be mentioned next, which is closely akin
to it. Of the individual letters, A is generally rounded,
but with some examples of the angular shape ; M is pointed
in the middle, which recalls one of the Ptolemaic forms;
Z is written continuously, but with more sharpness and
precision than is usual in later Eoman MSS. ; Y is
moderately curved, and the tail is usually kept to the
right, though not bent away as in the example last
quoted; €, O, C, tO, are all well rounded and fully formed;
the right-hand stroke of A projects upwards.

It so happens that the discovery of this document The
enables us to assign a date, with approximate accuracy, jiugg,,^
to a literary papyrus of considerable interest, containing Odyssey.
the latter part of the third book of the Odyssey''-- The
interest of this MS. lies not only in the fact of its being
the earliest extant copy of the Odyssey (which is of very
much less frequent occurrence in papyri than the Iliad), but
also in the beauty of the writing, which entitles it to be
regarded as the handsomest literary papyrus at present
known to exist. A terminus ante quern is given by
the occurrence of some scholia, written in a cursive hand
which appears to belong to the end of the first century;
but a more precise date may be derived from its close
resemblance in general appearance to the MS. which has
just been described. The resemblance, which cannot be
missed by any one who compares the two documents,
renders it certain, even apart from the collateral evidence
furnished by the scholia, that the Homer was written at
no great distance of time from the petition to Turranius;
while an examination of details shows that the latter is
the earlier of the two. In the Homer the A is more
rounded, M is deeply curved, Z is written continuously,

' Brit. Mus. Pap. colxxi. Facs. in Fal. Soc. ii. 182, partial faos. in Plate
XV ; text in Joumcd of Philology, xxii. 238. Alphabet in App. I, col. 12,

G 2

84 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

and curves replace the sharp angles noticed in the petition.
In all these typical letters the angular shapes have given
way to curves which are characteristically Roman in
nature. Of the other letters, € and C are well rounded,
the former having the cross-stroke very high, much as
in the Iliad MS. last described; H has the cross-bar ex-
ceptionally high ; and Y approaches the y-shape, the two
upper limbs branching off more equally than has usually
been the case hitherto. This is a transition shape in
the direction of the V-form which prevails later. The
general conclusion, therefore, to which palaeographical
data point is that 'the Odyssey papyrus was written near
the beginning of the jfirst century, and that the scholia,
which are of later appearance and include quotations
from the grammarian Apion, who flourished under
Caligula, were added 'in the second half of the same
century.
The More doubt attaches to another Homer papyrus, con-

Homer. Gaining the eighteenth book of the Iliad, and commonly
known (from the name of its first purchaser) as the
Harris Homer i. This was one of the first literary papyri
to be brought to light, and consequently enjoyed a some-
what exaggerated reputation of extreme old age. Sir
E. Thompson, whose authority in such matters is of the
highest, places it ' without hesitation as early as the first
century b. c.^.' The increase of evidence during recent
years makes it Y&rj doubtful whether so early a date
can be maintained. The whole aspect of the hand is
Eoman, not Ptolemaic, and one might even be inclined
at first sight to refer it to the second century, were it
not for certain letters which still recall the hands of
the first century B. c. These are especially A, which is of

' Brit. Mus. Pap. cvii ; facs. in Pal. Soc. ii. 64, and a less successful one
in the Cat. ofAnc. MSS. (Greek). Alphabet in App. I, col. 13.

^ Handbook, p. 124. In the Pal. Soc. and Cat. of Am. MSS. it is simply
described as 'perhaps first century e. c.'; but the Handbook is the latest
statement.

Plate XV.

ow U<kr onofoi 'Coi exo Y c cnx oi

^v^ vciu xorrrrt e Yarti p w xrf ' <} :^^'
t^ri e i A' u y c c M TC KM ex r j G;e:M h \ n e

■t ■ Xjun Yw Qfe^r oju e ^Jo^c^^ xxn Cf c^cecexc
r> OIKj o MC-ij^^ w 0X0 eYNfTC ce?4i kf 7 c(?o i C2
.: ^yVxf ene4 n ci ockai e aj-t ty oc exef o m <

f ^c^j^-^ji-Q o . AAf ATf Y xnixk-vi e M4^XY0 M M AC r

&^#<i^e'XH3H^vineTtiKiienTxoY'^ihYTTTpArf.<

■ ■ . . i . ■;

HOMER, ODYSSEY HI.— EARLY 1ST CENT.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 85

the angular type which is found in the Bacchylides, though
somewhat less sharply pronounced; and 6, which, again
as in the Bacchylides, is narrow, with a long projecting
cross-bar, and with the head of the letter often separated
from the rest. On the other hand M and Z are distinctly
Roman in character; A always has a projecting right-hand
stroke; M, N, fl, are square, not elongated as in Ptolemaic
hands ; C has a somewhat flattened top ; Y is approaching
the V pattern, and has quite lost its Ptolemaic appearance.
Some omitted lines have been supplied in the margin in
an ordinary cursive hand which seems to belong to the
beginning of the second century; and it is probably the
same hand that has added the accents and breathings.
On the whole it would appear that the MS. must be
assigned to the first century of our era ; though of course,
here as always, no pretence of dogmatism is admissible,
especially in conflict with other authorities.

Another MS. which has commonly been placed in the The
first century B. c, and sometimes even earlier, but which Museum
may now almost certainly be brought down to the first Hyper-
century after Christ, is the great papyrus of Hyperides —
the one by which his work was first made known to the
modern world — containing the prosecution of Demosthenes
and the defences of Lycophron and Euxenippus — the
latter being the only extant speech of the orator which
is absolutely intact. At the date when this MS. was
acquired by Messrs. Harris and Arden, there was practically
no means of forming an accurate idea of its age, and its
first editor, Mr. Babington, cautiously placed it between
the second century before, and the second century after,
the beginning of the Christian era. Subsequent scholars,
who have tried to be more precise, have in fact ranged
over the whole of this somewhat wide period. Sir
E. Thompson has assi^ed it to the first century B. c.^ ;

■ Ccd. of Anc. MSS. {Greek) ; HaudiooJe, p. 123. A complete facsimile
of the MS. (by hand) is given in Babington's edition ; photographic

86 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Prof. Blass to the second century after Christ^- But
this discrepancy between two eminent palaeographers
is due to the fact that they based their conclusions upon
different evidence. Prof. Blass was guided by the cursive
hand in which the title of the MS., giving a list of the
orations contained in it, is written, which he rightly
assigned to the second century after Christ; while Sir
E. Thompson equally rightly argued that the title is
not in the same hand as the body of the MS., and there-
fore gives nothing more than a termi7ius ante quern
for our assistance. It is, however, now sufficiently clear
that no date within the Ptolemaic age is possible for
this style of writing. The most marked feature of the
hand in its general appearance is its roundness — a dis-
tinctively Koman characteristic; and the forms of the
single letters all point the same way. A is written con-
tinuously, with rounded angles and somewhat loose con-
struction ; M is fully rounded ; Z is continuous, and rather
irregular ; C is rounded, and even shows a decided tendency
to fall forward — an indication of a date nearer the end of the
first century than the beginning ; Y is of the characteristi-
cally Koman type. The letters are not always well or firmly
formed ; and that again is a sign of a relatively late date.
On these grounds alone it would seem almost certain
that this papyrus cannot be placed earlier than the second
half of the first century ; and this conclusion has been
strongly confirmed by evidence which has lately come
to light. In the first place, striking resemblances to
this Hyperides MS. are found in the long poll-tax rolls
recently acquired by the British Museum, which bear
dates in the years 72 and 94^. Secondly, a small scrap

facsimiles of parts of it in Pal. Soc. i. 126, and Cat. of Am. MSS. Some
recently discovered fragments, now in the possession of Rossall School,
are shown in Plate XVI, through the kind permission of the Kev. J. P.
Way, head- master of Rossall. Alphabet in App. I, col. 14.

' I. Ton Miiller's Handbuch der klassischen Altertums- Wissmschaft, ed. 2, p. 3 12.

' Brit. Mus. Papp. cclvii-cclix, cclx-cclxi.

Plate XVI.

^•l^''

1 ■.ftf»I;,ft!1J

ri.^:-%.#:M.-^':rr^,

^^<of^^rT-:t"tf^'n3u.ds»i\r^: '" J ''

^1^^
:,**^

t.

.«;i«.

f'L

/'^^&:^pM

*^v*^i

HYPERIDES IN DEMOSTHENEM AND DEMOSTHENES OLYNTHIAC II.-LATE 1ST CENT.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 87

of a literary papyrus, in a hand almost identical with
the Hyperides, but somewhat larger, was acquired along
with a number of dated documents of the first and second
centuries'^. But the most conclusive evidence is afforded
by a fragment brought from Egypt by Mr. Grenfell
in 1895, and now in the Bodleian Library. It contains The Bod-
a small portion of the Homeric Lexicon of Apollonius, Apoilo-
though in a form somewhat different from that in which ''^"^•
it has hitherto been known ^- The evidence for its date
is a little complicated, but seems fairly conclusive, at
least as regards the terminus a quo. The grammarian
Apion is mentioned in various places in the Lexicon, and
one of these passages occurs in the Bodleian fragment.
The papyrus is, however, mutilated in this place, and
the name of Apion is not preserved ; so that it is con-
ceivable — considering the extent to which the texts of
Apollonius hitherto extant have been expanded from the
original — that the name might be a later addition. But
the size of the lacuna just suits the supposition that the
papyrus here had the same text as the later copies, and
there is no other natural way of filling it. It is therefore
a legitimate conclusion that Apion was mentioned in the
papyrus, when it was perfect; and since Apion flourished
under Tiberius and Caligula, it is practically certain that
the papyrus cannot be earlier than the middle of the
first century, while it may, of course, so far as this argu-
ment goes, be considerably later. The importance of this
conclusion lies in the fact that the fragment is written
in a hand of precisely the same type as the long
Hyperides MS. ; and if the Apollonius is not earlier
than the middle of the first century, the same must also
be the case with the Hyperides. The likeness between
the two MSS. is as great as it can be between two

' Brit. Mus. Pap. covin c.

^ A facsimile has been privately circulated by Bodley's Librarian, to
•whom the identiiication of the fragment is due.

88 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

hands which are not identical, and will be disputed by
no one who has compared the two.

It seems established, therefore, that the theories which
assigned the Hyperides to the Ptolemaic age, or even to
the first century of the Eoman period, must be abandoned ;
but there still remains the possibility that Blass is right
in placing it as late as the second century. But, in the
first place, the main ground of his view — namely, that
the title of the MS. is written in a cursive hand of the
second century — is unsound ; for the date of the title does
not necessarily establish the date of the MS., but merely
gives a terminus ante quern. Titles not only might be, but
actually were, written much later than the MSS. to which
they applied. A striking instance is given by the Bacchy-
lides papyrus, in which some of the poems are without
titles, while those which exist have plainly been written
at a later date than the poems themselves. So far, then,
as the evidence of the title goes, all that can be said is
that the MS. cannot be later than the end of the second
century, though it may be considerably earlier. It is here
that the evidence of the poll-tax rolls, above mentioned,
becomes important ; for they show that hands of the same
class as that of the Hyperides were in use in the last
thirty years of the first century, while no example of such
hands has yet been found of a later date. To this period,
then, of the end of the first century, the great Hyperides
MS. must almost certainly be referred. External testimony
here strongly supports the indications of palaeographical
science, and it will need clear evidence to overthrow their
joint conclusion.
Brit. Mus. ^t this point in the history of papyrus-palaeography
we come upon another document which, though not
literary in its contents, is yet, like the petition to Turranius
of circ. B.C. 10, of considerable value for the study of
literary hands. It is a lease of an oliveyard and other
lands in the village of Socnopaei Nesus, dated in the year

Plate XVII.

, Hi

.'I

f" 3' ^'^" ri

"ill C^ *.H, v^"^ r)

K i 't J ^f

'^^t.^^

rk I •f

wi

V ''^ ^H '"'^ c^

•pjii

/'h n; f ^ ^

il'

)

^^

r«i '">!

.H

t

1-^'

a 1

-i

4

i J

;: ^? >- . '*

' ' ' I [

i f

(

(•

,4^

it

Y^\'i

U'.v/ ;

(

1".,^^'
^

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 89

88 ; and instead of being written, as usual, in a small
and very cursive hand, it is executed in careful uncials
of a large size, with only a sprinkling of minuscule forms ^■
In size, the characters of this MS. are larger than any
that we have yet described, though some later documents
perhaps equal them. In type, they are plainly the fore-
runners of the handsome uncials in which the earlier vellum
MSS. are written. Before the discovery of this papyrus,
with its precise date near the end of the first century,
there was little or nothing to show that such hands went
back earlier than the fourth century at most. The present
document, though by no means perfect in execution, shows
that we must look much higher for the origin of this
hand ; and it also suggests a conclusion to which we shall
have to refer again presently, that the palaeography of
Greek papyri anticipated in its development the subsequent
history of writing upon vellum, so that the corresponding
stages of writing on the two materials are not contemporary,
but are separated by some centuries of time.

The letters of this papyrus are not uniformly uncial in
character, some of them being merely the current minuscule
forms written on a large scale. This is notably the case
with A and Y, while €, which is correctly formed as a general
rule, occasionally lapses, through the forgetfulness of the
scribe, into a completely minuscule form. Of the other
letters, M is conspicuously shallow in its central depression ;
Z is of the regular Roman type, and somewhat cursive
in appearance; C is well formed and upright; is large
and prominent; ti) is well written. The MS. as a whole
must be regarded, not as a thorough-going example of
a book-hand of a large uncial type, but as an indication
of what the contemporary book-hand might be. We cannot
say that this is a hand of the same character as those

' Facsimile in Pal. Soc. ii. 146, and in the atlas to Greek Papyri in the
British Museum, vol. ii ; partial facs. in Plate XVII. The papyrus is known
as Brit. Mus. Pap. cxli.

go PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

which are found in the great vellum MSS. of the fourth
and jfifth centuries; but we can say that, if this hand
could be found in a non-literary document of the year 88,
then a hand of the same character as those of the vellum
MSS. may have been in use for literary papyri at the
end of the first century. The large uncial hand, in short,
instead of being a creature of the fourth century, called
forth by the adoption of vellum into general use, exists on
papyrus at least three centuries earlier.
Brit. Mus. Further evidence in the same direction is given by another
oijcxxvii. papyrus in the British Museum (Pap. clxxxvii), which
contains a small fragment of a moral or historical treatise,
giving a description of the training of the youths of some
nation, apparently the Lacedaemonians ^ Only some sixteen
lines are preserved intact, or approximately so, with small
traces of some other lines in the same and adjoining
columns ; but quite enough remains to show that it was
a carefully written MS., in a large uncial hand. The letters
are of about the same size as those of the lease just
described, and are free from the intermixture of minuscules
by which that is disfigured. Its date is not known with
certainty, but the evidence which has just been given
authorizes us to place it at the end of the first or in the
course of the second century; and this is confirmed by
the fact that the verso of the papyrus bears writing in
a cursive hand which may safely be referred to the
beginning of the third century. The writing of the
AaKsMiixovCaiv TroAtreta (or whatever the treatise is) is careful,
delicate, and handsome ; and its size and shape put it
definitely in the line of ancestry of the vellum uncials.
A ' continues to be of the rounded form ; M is very deeply
curved ; C is so much rounded as to be hardly distinguish-
able from O, a feature which is perhaps in favour of
a date in the second rather than the first century. The

' Published (without facsimile) in the Eomw de Philologie, xxi. i (1897).

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 91

columns of writing are narrow, containing, in this large
hand, only some twelve to fifteen letters.

Between the first and the second centuries after Christ
it is impossible, at any rate with the evidence now available,
to draw any firm line of palaeographical demarcation. No
external change came over the government of Egypt which
could affect the local handwriting. The development of
the Roman hand pursued a natural course ; and in the
absence of precisely dated examples it is impossible to
fix its stages with certainty. There are a considerable
number of MSS. which appear to belong to this period;
but it would require a bold palaeographer to decide, with
regard to most of them, whether they were written in
the second century or the last half of the first. It so
happens that most of the MSS. referred to contain parts
of Homer; but the list also includes the unique papyrus
of Herodas, a speech ■ of Isocrates, and a few minor
pieces ^.

Close to the border line, but almost certainly within The
the limits of the first century, comes a papyrus of very ^"gg^^^
great literary interest, namely that which contains the Aristotle.
'AdrivaCoov YloXireCa of Aristotle ^ ; but unfortunately, of the
four hands in which it is written, only one at all approaches
the character of a book-hand, and that is plainly not
the work of a trained scribe, from the number of clerical
blunders which it contains. Rather is the MS. a striking
example of what may be called the private method of
circulating literature in the ancient world. Libraries were
few'and far between, and copies of literary works written
by professional scribes may have been difficult and expen-
sive to obtain in the upper parts of Egypt. Hence we
seem to see the existence of a practice of lending MSS.

' The list has been considerably increased by the recent discoveries
of Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt at Oxyrhynchus, which include several
literary fragments belonging to this period.

^ Complete facsimile published by the Trustees of the British Museum
(1891) ; specimen plate in Pal. Soc. ii. 12a.

92 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

to be transcribed privately by those who wished toi possess
copies of the work; and if new papyrus could not be
readily obtained, a roll which had already been used
might be made to do duty again. This is what happened
in the case of the Aristotelian treatise. It is written on
the back of some old farm accounts," and the greater
part of it is written in hands of a very cursive character.
Apparently speed was necessary — perhaps the MS. from
which it was copied could only be lent for a short time ;
for the different scribes evidently began independently,
and their several sections do not exactly join. Two of
the writers seem to be men of culture, able to write Greek
correctly ; and since their hands are similar in appearance
(though certainly not identical, as ha^ been suggested),
it is perhaps not very fanciful to suppose that they are
those of the owner of the MS. and a near kinsman. The
other scribes seem to have been slaves, and their Greek
is far from correct. One of them writes a sort of rough
uncial hand, square, thick, and inelegant; the other, who
takes up his work when he has finished it, tries at first
to. imitate his uncials, but quickly slides into a loose
and ill-formed cursive hand, in which he completes his
portion. Some of the more glaring blunders of the illiterate
scribes are corrected in the hands of their educated
collaborators. The date of the whole MS. is limited on
the one side by the fact that the farm accounts on the
recto are dated in the years 78-9 ; while the close resem-
blance of the cursive writing of the Aristotle to that of
several documents (since discovered) of the reign of Domi-
tian^ makes it highly probable that it was not written
very far from the year 90.
The auto- A somewhat special interest attaches to this MS., not
fhe^New o'^ty ^^ ^^^ ground of its contents, but also because
Testa- the method of private transcription, of which it is an

inent.

' See above, Plate VI, for an example. Another (of a. d. 83-4) is given in
the Fuhrer durch die AussteHung der Papyrus Ersher^g Rainer, pi. ix.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 93

example, must have been very commonly employed in
the case of the Scriptures of the New Testament. The
Christians of the first century were not predominantly
an educated body, nor were they, as a rule, wealthy.
Hence, in many parts of the Greek world, they could
neither transcribe their Scriptures in the best literary
hands of the period, nor pay professional scribes to do
so for them; and they must consequently have often
fallen back on the method of amateur, or private, tran-
scription. This would especially be the ease in times of
persecution, when the trade of transcribing the Scriptures
could not have been carried on publicly even in the
communities where there were otherwise facilities for
such work. In the writing of the Aristotle, therefore,
one may see an example of the manner in which the
Christian Scriptures were often transmitted ; and in these
circumstances one may find part of the explanation of the
early rise of a large number of various readings. No
doubt there were exceptions, and some of the autographs
of the New Testament books may have been well and
carefully written ; but the manner of transmission just
described must have been employed on all the books
in some stage of their history, and its characteristics
should therefore be borne in mind as a datum in the
textual criticism of the New Testament.

This, however, is somewhat of a digression from the
immediate subject in hand, the development of the literary
form of writing on papyrus; and it is time to return
to the other MSS. which, as mentioned above, seem to
fall within the latter part of the first century or in the
course of the second. One of these, which ranks next
to the Aristotle in point of literary interest, is also
remarkable as standing rather apart from the general
line of development, and provides a salutary proof of the
error of assuming that only one type of hand can have
prevailed at any one period. This is the papyrus of

94 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

The Herodas^, containing the mimes of that otherwise prae-

Herodas . . .

Papyrus, tically unknown writer of the Alexandrian age. As has

been stated in an earher chapter, it is the smallest papyrus-
roll extant in respect of height, measuring no more than
5 inches, and containing only i8 lines, on an average,
in each column. As an almost necessary consequence, it
is written in a small and compact hand, clear and easy
to read, but almost entirely devoid of ornamentation.
Indeed the matter-of-fact realism of the poems seems
to be reflected in the plain, unadorned appearance of
the writing. The forms of the letters, when examined
in detail, are unquestionably of the Eoman period, but
the general appearance of the writing is so unlike that
of any other extant papyrus, that it is exceptionally
difiicult to fix its date from palaeographical considerations.
In the editio princeps it was assigned to the second or
third century, but increased knowledge makes it almost
certain that this date is too late. The clearest proof
of this comes from the accuracy with which non-literary
hands can now generally be dated. In the course of the
MS. a line has been accidentally omitted, and has been
supplied in the upper margin of the papyrus in a cursive
hand ; and it happens that this contains an ?/ of the pecu-
liar form (^) which has been described in a previous chapter
as characteristic of the period from about A. d. 50 to 160.
It is, no doubt, impossible to say how long after the
transcription of the MS. this omission was made good.
It may be said that the probabilities are against an error
in so comparatively rare a poet, and in a MS. in private
hands, being corrected from any except the original MS.
from which it was copied; but such a probability does
not amount to an argument of much strength. It is,
however, clear that the third century, and even the last

■ Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxxt. Complete facsimile published by the Trustees
of the British Museum (1892) ; text, with specimen facsimile, in Classical
Texts ; facs. of one column in Plate XVIIL

ir'LATE A V 111.

^^c T«N iri-f »f; ^ K.j-f rf-r^ nr\. ceo r-^

. ^.^-,- . _^ _j _::;:^-:^.«— .^„_l '^^iS

IIERODAS.— 1ST OR 2ND CENT.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 95

part of the second, is too late a date to assign, and that
the MS. should rather be placed in the first century
or the first half of the second century. The forms of
the individual letters require little notice ; A is of the
rounded type ; M is deeply curved (ju, u) ; Z has the top
stroke separate, but the middle and lower strokes united
( jI ), a variant which may indicate a relatively early date,
but is so rare as to provide no secure basis of argument ' ;
Y is very stiff" and straight, usually with a very short
tail. Throughout it is a plain representation of Roman
semi-uncial, with less grace than usual, but quite without
affectation or mannerism ^.

Another MS. which should probably be placed about The
the turn of the century is the British Museum papyrus Museum
of Isocrates Flept Elprivr]s ^. ' It is a large papyrus, mutilated isoerates.
at the beginning, and written in two distinct hands, the
first of which is decidedly better than the second. The
latter indeed verges closely on the non-literary type of
hand, and is certainly not the work of a trained scribe.
The first hand has several features in common with the
large Hyperides MS. A is rounded; Y is curved, not
forked, which favours a date in the first century; C falls
forward to some extent, which shows that it cannot be
early in that century. The other letters are not distinctive.
The second hand is loose and straggling to an extent
which is not found before the latter part of the first

' This form recurs in the Oxyrhynchus fragment of Demosthenes, men-
tioned above (p. 76).

'' Prof. Blass has recently, in a sort of obiter dictum, assigned the Herodas to
the Ptolemaic period {Bacchylidis Garmina, pp. vii, viii), on the ground of its
frequent interchange of 1 and ei, which he regards as characteristic of this
period ; but (i) a study of the non-literary papyri of the first and second
centuries shows that such iotaeisms were extremely common then (and
this evidence is especially applicable to a MS. which, like the Herodas, is
evidently not the work of a highly-trained scribe) ; and (2) the forms
of the letters are wholly of the Roman type.

' Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxxii. Two specimen facsimiles in Classical Texts,
with collation.

96

PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Some
Homeric
papyri :
Brit. Mus,
Pap.

CXXXVI.

century at earliest. Its A, C, and Y are substantially the
same as those just described; and it has a very cursive
form of e. On the whole, the end of the first century
or the first half of the second seem to be the most
probable dates for this MS., which, it may be remarked,
is of some importance in the history of the transmission
of Greek literary texts, since it shows that, of the two
well-marked families into which the vellum MSS. of
Isocrates are divided, neither is exclusively to be trusted,
and that the formation of these families does not go back
to classical, or even to early Christian, times. It also
tends to show that the text of Isocrates was substantially
the same in the first century of our era as that which
has been preserved for us in MSS. a thousand years
later. But this is to trespass outside the domain of
palaeography.

We come now to a large group of Homer MSS., including
three somewhat small fragments in the Louvre, three long
rolls in the British Museum, and a long and very inter-
esting MS. in the Bodleian. It would be absurdly rash
to try to place these in a precise chronological sequence ;
but it is worth while to describe them severally, and to
show on what grounds they are assigned to the period
now under consideration.

In one instance there is external evidence in the shape
of dated writing on the other side of the papyrus. This
is Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxxvt, a roll containing nearly the
whole of the fourth book of the Iliad, and fragments
of Book III ^ It is written in a rough, uneducated hand,
which gives it an appearance of later date than seems
to be actually true. The recto of the papyrus is occupied
by accounts, and among these are dates which must belong
to the reign of Augustus ; and since a papyrus of accounts

' Specimen facsimile in Classical Texts, Plate vii. The MS. is there
wrongly dated, the evidence derivable from the vrriting on the recto not
having been discovered. Attention was first called to it by Prof. Wilcken.

Plate X1.\.

-TOviK>i^-*H?{owHCTtfcn'«^ocKfc:scjucfOQn(a&tt|ic^^,

HOMER, ILIAD XIII.— 1ST OR 2ND CENT.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 97

would not be likely to be preserved very long (the case
of the Aristotle MS. shows how soon such a papyrus
might be used again), it seems almost certain that the
Homer must have been inscribed upon the verso in the
course of the first century. On the other hand the over-
hanging shape of C and the v-shape of Y make it impossible
to place it before the latter part of the century ; and it
may be even later than this. It is, however, so plainly
not the work of a professional transcriber of literary
MSS., that its importance in palaeographical history is not
great.

Much more interesting, from the palaeographical point Brit. Mus.
of view, is a papyrus brought from Egypt by Mr. Grenfell j,o^xxii.
in 1896, and now in the British Museum (Pap. Dccxxxii)^.
It is one of the longest Homer papyri in existence,
containing the greater part of Iliad xiii and xiv, carefully
written in a fine and ornamental hand. Indeed in point
of appearance it is perhaps inferior to none but the British
Museum Odyssey papyrus, described above. It has the
uncial form of A — always a sign of a carefully written
MS., but not confined to any one period ; and the general
aspect of the hand is square, firm, and well-formed. The
other letters have the shapes which we have seen to be
characteristic of the fully-developed Koman hand; G is
well-rounded, with rather a long cross-bar; Z is square
in form, and its cross-stroke not unfrequently meets the
lower bar in the middle instead of at the end, which
is an archaic feature; H has its cross-bar very high;
the right-hand stroke of A projects but little above the
point of junction; M and Z have their regular Roman
forms; C is well rounded, but upright; Y is v-shaped;
4' is very angular; and CO is rather stiff and compact.
The whole writing is rather compressed, and has a ten-
dency to lean backwards. So far as the forms just

' A facsimile of a portion is given in Plate XIX. Alphabet in App. I,
col. 15.

H

Bankes
Homer.

98 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

described differ from the average Roman hand of the
end of the first and the second century, they lean towards
the earher forms ; and consequently, if one were compelled
to assign a date within narrow limits, one would be disposed
to place it in the first century. It is, however, just a ease
where additional care on the part of the scribe may make
a MS. appear older than it is, through his retaining the
older forms of letters ; and it would consequently not be
wise to attempt to define the date too closely.
The The same may be said of another Homer-papyrus, which,

in contrast to that just described, was the earliest of its
class to be discovered. This is the MS. known as the
Bankes Homer, from the name of the gentleman who
brought it from Egypt in the year 1831. It contains
the last book of the Iliad, in very good condition 1. It
is written in a typically Eoman hand, but with less
precision and compactness than the last example. A is
of the angular form which is seen as far back as the
first century B. c, but is more irregularly written ; the cross-
bar of G is low; A has a long projection above the point
of junction ; C is round and upright ; Y is v-shaped and
rather straggling. The greater looseness and irregularity
of the writing suggest that it is somewhat later than
the last-mentioned MS., and that it should be placed in
the second century, as it has been by Sir E. Thompson;
but here again one does not know how much to allow
for the personal equation of the scribe. There are a few
corrections in a cursive hand which appears to be of
this century, but one cannot tell how long after the
original MS. they were written. An earlier date than
the first century, such as used formerly to be ascribed
to this MS., may be pronounced quite impossible in view
of modern knowledge.

The Homer papyri of the Louvre may be dismissed

' Now Brit. Mus. Pap. cxrv ; specimen facsimile in Cut. of Ancient MSS.
{Greek}, plate vi, and in Pal. Soo. i. 153. Alphabet in App. I, col. 16.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 99

more summarily, being very much smaller in extent The
and of no importance, either palaeographical or textual. Homers
Three fragments are included in the publication in the
Notices et Extraits (nos. 3, 3**^ and 3*^')^. Of these the
best from the palaeographical point of view is no. 3'*'',
a small fragment of what must once have been a hand-
some copy of the thirteenth book of the Iliad. It has
the uncial A, but all the other test letters, such as M, Z
and Y, are distinctly Roman. It may belong to either
the first or the second century. Papyrus no. 3'''° is less
handsomely written, and has the .rounded minuscule form
of A ; but there is nothing in the shapes of the letters to
show that it is substantially later than the others. The
remaining fragment, no. 3, is the least ornamental of the
three, and probably the latest in date, being written in
a somewhat loose and shaky hand. It does not appear,
however, to be later than the second century, and shakiness
of hand is less to be relied on as a sign of a relatively late
date in papyri than in vellum MSS. ; for the latter are
almost invariably the work of professional scribes, and are
generic rather than individual in their styles, whereas
a large number of papyrus MSS. were written by amateur
or semi- amateur transcribers, and reflect the idiosyn-
crasies of the individual as well as the tendencies or
fashions of the age in which he lived. In cases such as this,
therefore, we must be content with a rather wide range of
uncertainty.

The first and second centuries represent the prime of the
Roman style, and the principal MSS. belonging to them
have now been described. It will have been seen that it is
normally a hand of moderate size, with letters square in
shape and well-rounded ^ ; moreover, so far as we have yet

1 Facsimiles (by hand) in the atlas accompanying vol. xviii. of N. et R,
plates xii and xlix.

^ The terms are not contradictory, ' square ' implying that the letters,
whether angular or curved in outline, may be enclosed within a square.

H 2,

loo PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

gone, the letters are upright, even though the columns
of writing sometimes lean to the right. It is a neat,
orderly, business-like hand, and in its best manifestations
graceful and, so far as is consistent with simplicity,
ornamental. It is very probable that a fragment of the
Orestes of Euripides, now at Geneva, should be added to
the list of beautifully- written MSS. of this period; but
its editor^, Prof. Nicole, who describes it as the handsomest
example of writing upon papyrus known to him, does not
fix its date precisely, and no facsimile of it has been
published. Certainly, in the present writer's judgement,
the best examples of the Roman period excel those of any
other period in grace and beauty, as well as in general
workmanlike qualities ; and this without in the least depre-
ciating the attractiveness of the strength and precision
seen in the best Ptolemaic papyri, such as the Louvre
Hyperides or the British Museum Bacchylides ^.

Ptolemaic letters are generally broader than they are high, and Byzantine
higher than they are broad, while Roman are normally abont equal in
each dimension. And whereas Ptolemaic letters are angular, Eoman have
their curves well rounded.

' In the Bmue de Philologie, xix. 105.

- The account which has been given of the palaeography of the first and
second centuries is oonfii-med by the recently-published Oxyrhynohus
papyri. The published facsimiles from these papyri include a small but
beautifully- written fragment assigned to Alcman, apparently of the end
of the first century ; a fragment of Thucydides (Book iv.) in a small,
irregular hand, probably of the latter part of the first century, but
recalling in its size the much earlier papyrus of the third Demosthenic
epistle (p. 78 above) ; and the fragment of the TIpooifiia Armrj-^optKo. of
Demosthenes, to which reference has been made above in connexion with
the Bacchylides MS., written in a broad, slightly sloping hand, rather
loose in formation. Some other fragments of later date will be mentioned
below. Another recently-published papyrus of this period is a mathe-
nlatical fiagment known as the Ayer papyrus, brought from Egypt in
189s, and now in the Field Museum at Chicago (edited, with facsimile,
by Mr. E. J. Goodspeed in the Ammcan Journal of Philology, xix. 25^ It is
written in an ornamental hand approaching the uncial type, and has
been assigned by some authorities to the second or even the third century,
but would appear from the facsimile to be not later than the first. Some
of the letters, especially Y, are quite of the early Roman type.

Plate XX.

r

> ' /"vs ^'-^li '^ V "- '■ - "^ ^'M i^- ^ ^-^ >n
<- ' r"" ■ •-• ' ~ >^ •"- *■;. v ■"'". K^ -^ >^ CT' '--^ -^ '■

- ■-, ^..':*^ :*■., .^ .:.■.■ -,i:c^ Y'^'-"'' .'i'^!^ ]k ^ X --' -'.s' *

o

n

o

z

7

>•■ *"^ fr ^- ^ c <^-^-y Z.>^:;- ■^.: ,%l: ,

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD loi

One MS. has, however, been reserved for separate con- The
sideration, which has a strong claim to be regarded as yet Homer,
handsomer than any that has hitherto been mentioned.
This is a copy of the second book of the Iliad, found
at Hawara by Mr. Fhnders Petrie, and now in the
Bodleian Library ; and it has been reserved on account of
the doubt attaching to its date. Sir E. Thompson, whose
judgement in palaeographical matters stands unquestionably
first, originally assigned it to the fifth century, on account
of its resemblance to the vellum MSS. of that date ; and it
is with great diffidence that a different opinion is here
propounded. The MS. is written in an exceptionally large
and carefully-formed hand^. The letters are square in
build, upright in position, with well-rounded curves. A is
of the uncial shape, with the cross-bar rather high ; £ has
the cross-bar rather low, as also has H ; M is deeply curved ;
Y is Y-shaped, but not of the Ptolemaic or early Roman type.
The other letters possess no distinctive characteristics, but
are square, well-curved specimens of the best Roman hand.
Now in many respects the characteristics here described
apply to the vellum uncials of the fifth and sixth centuries, as
they are seen in such MSS. as the Codex Alexandrinus and
the Codex Claromontanus ; and it is on this ground that
Sir E. Thompson assigns to the papyrus a date contempora-
neous with these MSS. On the other hand it will be seen
that, except in point of size, the forms of the letters are just
those of the Roman hand of the first and second centuries.
At the time when the papyrus was discovered, no uncials
of this size had been found among the papyri, and it was
perfectly natural to associate them with the vellum uncials
to which they unquestionably bear a considerable resem-
blance. The position has, however, since been altered by
the discovery of such documents as the lease of a. d. 88,

1 Facsimile of one column in Petrie's Hawara, Biahmu, and Arsinoe ;
part of a column in plate XX. Alphabet in App. I, col. 17.

I02 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

described above, and the fragment of the AaKeSainxovtwv
YloXiTua, which show that a large uncial hand was in
use upon papyrus as early as the first or second century.
Hitherto the genesis of the hands seen in the early vellum
uncials has been unknown; but it now begins to seem
probable that they are the direct descendants of the hand
which had been used for the best papyrus MSS. two
hundred years earlier. Further reasons in support of this
view will be found below, and will be considered in the
next chapter, in connexion with the transition from
papyrus to vellum ; but meanwhile there is another argu-
ment in favour of an early date for the Oxford Homer.
A few notes have been added in the margins by a hand
different from that of the text; and these are written
in a sloping hand which will be seen presently to belong to
the third century ^. No doubt a sloping hand also followed
the vellum uncials of the fifth and sixth centuries; but
it is to be remembered that after the beginning of the
seventh century Greek writing upon papyrus becomes very
much less common, and there is nothing Byzantine in
the hand in which these notes are written.

It is not maintained that these arguments are conclusive,
especially as the history of large uncial writing on papyrus
is not by any means fully known to us; but they seem
to establish a strong probability that the Homer may
be placed as early as the second century. Some slight
confirmation of this conclusion may be found in a com-
parison of this MS. with the two minute scraps which
appear at the bottom of the plate containing the fragments
of the large Hyperides MS. (plate XVI). These scraps,
coming from what must have been a very handsome copy
of Demosthenes' Olynthiacs, were found in a dummy
roll of papyrus along with the Hyperides fragments and

' One of these notes may be seen in the right-hand margin of the
facsimile ; but it is so faint in the plate as to be of little use to any one
who has not seen the original.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 103

other material, none of which was later than the second
century. There is therefore some slight presumption
that they were themselves not very much later than that
period ; and it will be seen that there is a considerable
resemblance between them and the Oxford Homer. It
may be doubted also whether so handsome a copy
would have been written on papyrus at a time when
the substitution of vellum for that material had already
been in progress for nearly a century ; but this argument
cannot be pressed, since such a question might be affected
by the idiosyncrasies of an individual book-lover. The
safest conclusion appears at present to be that the
probabilities point to the second century as the date
for this handsome MS., but that it would not be safe
to treat it as an ascertained fact which may be used for
the dating of other papyri. There can be very little doubt
that the point will be settled before long by the discovery
of fresh materials ^.

A short mention is perhaps due, in conclusion, to a MS. The
of considerable literary importance belonging to this oration of
period, though it falls rather outside the sequence of j^^P®'''
palaeographical development; namely the papyrus which
contains the Funeral Oration of Hyperides^. Like the
papyrus of Aristotle, the oration is written on the verso
of the roll, and in a private and non-literary hand. It
is not even, as the Aristotle is, a copy made by some

• An important piece of evidence in support of the conclusion stated
above has already come to light in one of the Oxyrhynchus papyri (Gren-
fell and Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, i, no. ao, plate v). This is, curiously
enough, also a copy of the second book of the Iliad, and is written in
a large and ornamental hand, sti-ongly resembling that of the Oxford
Homer ; while its date is approximately fixed by the occurrence on the verso
of some accounts which cannot be later than the third century. The
Oxford Homer may, therefore, now be assigned to the second century with
considerable confidence.

" Brit. Mus. Pap. xcviii ; complete facsimile (by hand) in the editio
princeps by Churchill Babington ; specimen photographic facsimile in
Cat. ofAnc. MSS. (Greek), -plate iv.

104 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

private person desirous of possessing a work of classical
antiquity. The character of the handwriting and the
multitude of mistakes sliow that it must be a mere school-
boy's exercise. Its literary value, in spite of the many
blunders of transcription, is very great, since it alone
preserves for us one of the most famous speeches of an
orator who stood among the first in a time when the
oratory of the world reached its highest pitch; but for
the humbler purposes of palaeography it is not very useful.
A schoolboy's exercise can throw little light on the writing
of trained literary scribes, and holds no place in the
history of palaeography. The date of the MS. is given
approximately, though not precisely, by the writing on
the recto, which consists of a horoscope, the year of which
is shown by astronomical calculations to be either A. d. 95
or A. D. 155, with a decided probability in favour of the
former. A horoscope would probably lose its interest
after the lapse of a generation or so, and the oration
may consequently be dated with practical certainty in
the course of the second century^. The horoscope itself
is written in a neat and graceful hand, which approaches
the literary type, and serves to confirm the description
which has already been given of the Roman hand. The
same may be said of another horoscope in the British
Museum (Pap. ex), which is dated in the year 138 ^-

The third The character of the book-hand of the first and second

century, centuries has now been established as fully as the extant

materials allow, and all the important documents which

' A MS. which in some degree recalls the writing of the Funeral
Oration is published by Messrs. Greufell and Hunt among the Oxyrhynchus
papyri (no. 9, plate iii). It is a fragment of a treatise upon metre,
probably by Aristoxenus, written in a rather ugly hand of medium size,
sloping backwards, and in dark ink. It may be assigned to the latter
part of the second or to the third centuiy.

° Facsimiles of both these horoscopes are giyen in the atlas accompanying
vol. i. of Greek Papyri in the British Museum,

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 105

come within that period have been described. In passing
to the third century we enter a region much more obscure.
There are no MSS. which can be assigned to it with
absolute certainty, or even with such a clear approach
to certainty as was the case with many of the papyri
which have hitherto been discussed; and there are not
many which can be placed in it on reasonably probable
evidence. There is, however, a group of MSS., exhibiting
the same general type of hand, which, in the light of
recent discoveries, appears to belong to this century; and'
it is a group of some importance in palaeographical history.
The evidence on which this date is assigned to it is cir-
cumstantial rather than direct; but it seems to be fairly
conclusive.

The MS. on which the decision of the question mainly Brit. Mus.
turns is a papyrus in the British Museum containing the ^P''^*'^'-
second, third, and fourth books of the Iliad^. Unlike
all the papyri which have hitherto been described, it is
in book form, consisting of eighteen leaves, the text being
written on one side only. The most noticeable character-
istic of the hand in which it is written is that it has
a decided slope. This in itself marks it oif from the
upright hands of the first and second centuries, and it
also produces a lateral elongation of many of the letters
which is quite alien to the square build of the earlier
characters. A becomes broad, with a tendency to revert
to the angular shape of the later Ptolemaic style ; M shows
a similar tendency, becoming at once wider and shallower
than before ; € is less weU rounded ; O is very small ; Y is
angular and Y-shaped. The general aspect of the hand
is rough and coarse, but this may be due to the scribe,
who certainly was not a well-educated man, rather than
to the times in which he lived.

' Pap. cxxvi ; specimen facsimile in Classical Tenets, plate vi. The cata-
logue of ships is omitted from Book ii. and only the first hundred lines of
Book iv. are preserved. Alphabet in App. I, col. 18.

io6 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

There is no direct evidence of the date of the MS., but
some indirect evidence is provided by the writing which
stands on the verso of the last four leaves, containing
a short grammatical treatise attributed to Tryphon^- It
is written in a fairly good cursive hand, rather small
and compact, and leaning somewhat to the right. Until
quite recently there was nothing to fix the date of this
hand, so that it was of no use in establishing the age of
the writing on the recto ; but the clue has been fur-
nished by some of the papyri brought home in 1896 by
Mr. Grenfell. Some of these are dated in the reign of
Diocletian, in the years just on either side of a. d. 300 ;
and a comparison shows great similarity between these
hands and that of the Tryphon. If, then, the Tryphon is
to be placed somewhere about the year 300, the Homer
must have been written earlier, and may safely be as-
signed to the third century. These dates are earlier
than those which have previously been attached to the
MS. ^ ; but whereas the former opinion rested upon little
but conjecture, the new dates are based upon fairly good
evidence.

The results of this discovery are of some importance.
In the first place it seems to carry with it the dates of
a certain number of other documents, to which no dates
could be satisfactorily assigned before, but which exhibit
a sloping hand akin to that which has been described.
For instance, there is a fragment of the well-known
The Berlin theological work, the Shepherd of Hermas, published
Hermas. (^i^Q^gi^ ^^^ identified) by Wilcken ^. The editor of this
fragment, who stands quite at the head of the continental
students of papyri, could not, at the time of the publica-
tion (j8go), make any closer approximation to its date

' Specimen facsimile in Classical Texts, plate ix.

'' In Classical Texts the Homer is provisionally assigned to the fourth
or fifth century, the Tryphon to the fifth or perhaps the sixth.
^ Tafeln zur dlieren griechischen Palaographie, plate iii.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 107

than to say that it must be some centuries older than
a certain vellum MS. of the eighth century (the Frag-
mentum Mathematicum Bobiense) to which it bears some
general resemblance. It is now, however, fairly clear
that it must be placed in or near the third century,
being written in a sloping hand akin to that of the British
Museum Homer, though somewhat finer and thinner in
style. The letters are of much the same shape, except
that the curve of M is rather less shallow, and the hand
as a whole shows the same evidence of looseness and
degeneration.

Another fragment of some interest is the small piece other
of Ezekiel discovered by Mr. Grenfell, and now in the siopi'n "
Bodleian, containing a Hexaplar text, with a few of the l»and.
critical symbols employed by Origen^. Mr. Grenfell's
second volume contains three additional examples of this
type of hand, which may all be assigned to the same
century ; namely, the very interesting scrap of Pherecydes,
a portion of a drama (there identified with the Melanippe
Besmotis of Euripides, but perhaps a comedy), and parts
of two columns of a prose work, which has been identi-
fied by Prof. Blass and others as a portion of the Memora-
bilia of Xenophon^. In the case of the drama, the
evidence of date is strengthened by its possessing some
scholia in a cursive hand which cannot be later than the
third century.

The existence may consequently be taken to be estab-
lished of a sloping type of hand, which is characteristic
of the third century; and this confirms the conclusion
to which reference has already been made, that the history
of writing upon papyrus anticipates that of writing upon
vellum, so that similar phenomena on different materials
do not indicate contemporaneousness in date, but, on the

' Grenfell, Greek Papyri, i. 5 (without facsimile).

^ Grenfell and Hunt, Greek Papyri, ii. 11-13; facs. of the Pherecydes and
the drama, in plates iv and iii respectively.

io8 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

contrary, admit of a difference of some centuries. On
vellum a sloping hand is first found about the eighth cen-
tury ; but no one would propose to place the papyri which
exhibit a sloping hand so late as this, when Greek writing
was practically extinct in Egjrpt. If, however, these
papyri are put back to the fifth or sixth century, as has
hitherto been done, the principle of conformity with the
vellum MSS. is abandoned, and there is consequently no
reason why we should not carry them yet further back
to the third century, if, as is now the case, trustworthy
evidence points to such a conclusion.
The Jt go happens that papyri of this type are, at present,

Isocrates. not at all plentiful in number, and nearly all that exist
are mere scraps. Besides the Homer MS. already described,
only one literary document of any size can as yet be
placed in this category, namely the Marseilles papyrus
of Isocrates In Nicoclevi'': Concerning the date of this
MS., which is of some value to the textual tradition
of Isocrates, very diverse opinions have been expressed;
the first editor, Schoene, assigning it to the Ptolemaic
age, while B. Keil, who followed Schoene in discussing
the MS., places it in the fifth century after Christ. The
former date is manifestly impossible ; the latter is probably
too late. The MS. is written in two hands, the first
a light, sloping hand, with affinities to those which have
just been described, while the second is solider and heavier,
having no very close parallels among extant papyri. It
is, of course, possible that this hand shows us the successor
of the third-century hand, but the difierences in the shapes
of individual letters are not very great, and it is more
likely that both hands belong to the third century, and
only differ through the personal idiosyncrasies of different
scribes ^.

' Two specimen facsimiles (showing the different hands) in Melanges
Graux, with article by E. Schoene.
" The Oxyrhynchus papyri contribute some additional examples of this

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 109

In addition to this sloping book-hand, a semi-literary
hand of a very different appearance is found in use in
the latter part of the century. It resembles the cursive
hand of the same period, which has been described in
chapter III (p. 46), and is, in fact, that cursive hand
adapted for literary use. An example of it may be seen British
in a fragment of a Psalter in the British Museum^, Psaiter
which may apparently stand with the Oxford Ezekiel, ^^P-
a page of St. Matthew among the Oxyrhynchus papyri,
and a scrap of Isaiah in the Rainer collection at Vienna,
as the earliest extant remains of the Greek Bible. The
hand is upright and somewhat showy, with the letters
K and O especially prominent ; but as it does not appear
to be a regularly-established book-hand, it need not be
described at length. The Psalter in question was appar-
.ently used as a school-book, having the separate syllables
marked off by a different hand, to which is probably also
to be ascribed some writing on the verso in which the
syllables are actually written apart. This writing on the
verso is in a cursive hand which belongs to the third or
fourth century, and consequently confirms the date which
has been assigned to the Psalter.

A hand very similar to that of the Psalter, though
rather smaller, is found in a long magical papyrus in

sloping third-eentury hand. The most important of these from the
literary point of view is the fragment -which is attributed, with great
probability, to Sappho (no. 7, plate ii), and which is palaeographically
notable as containing the only written example of a digamma, with the
exception of one in the Paris Alcman. Still more important palaeo-
graphically is a fragment of Plato's Laws (no. 23, plate vi), on the verso
of which is a date in the year a. d. 295, and which consequently confirms
the attribution of hands of this type to the third century at latest. A
fragment of St. Matthew (no. is, plate i), which is likewise assigned to the
third centm-y, is written in too rough and untrained a hand to be of
much palaeographical value.

' Brit. Mus. Pap. coxxx ; a roughly printed facsimile in Alhenceum for
Sept. 8. 1894. The arguments there adduced for believing the papyrus
to have been in book form do not appear to be sound.

no PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

the British Museum ^ ; the semi-literary character of the
contents being suited well enough by the semi-literary
style of the writing.

The consideration of these MSS. has brought us to the
end of the third century, and here, with the re-organization
of the Roman world by Diocletian, the Roman period of
palaeography comes to an end too. In the domain of non-
literary papyri we have seen that this change of government
is accompanied by a change in the current style of writing,
which makes the division into periods real, and not merely
arbitrary. In the department of literary palaeography
there is likewise a change, which comes to pass at about
the same date, but it is a change of a different character,
the nature of which will be considered in the following
chapter.

To sum up in brief the history of the period which has
just been described, it will be seen that it covers a space
of some 350 years, as against the 250 or 200 which are
all that the present limits of our knowledge give to the
Ptolemaic age. The main characteristic introduced into
Greek writing during this period is that of roundness,
which is accompanied by increased fluency of style.
Letters are formed with curves instead of angles, and they
are written, as much as possible, without raising the pen.
The half-century which lies before the beginning of the
Christian era concludes the period of transition which had
begun under the later Ptolemies, and by about a. d. i the
Roman style, with its rounded curves and square build
of letters, is well established. The first century is the
period of its perfection ; but before the close of it signs
of decay appear in the greater slackness and looseness
of formation in many letters. During the second century
this tendency is increased, and the appearance of firmness
combined with grace, which marks the earlier Roman

' Brit. Mus. P.np. cxxi ; facs. in atlas aoeompanying vol. i. of Greek Papyri
in the British Museum.

LITERARY PAPYRI OF THE ROMAN PERIOD iii

hand, disappears from all except the best MSS. In the
third century uprightness is exchanged for a sloping hand,
— always a sign of degeneracy in palaeography ; and this
is generally accompanied by looseness and irregularity
in the individual letters. The Roman hand has plainly
run its course, and there is room for the new departure
which has now to be considered.

CHAPTER VI

THE TRANSITION TO VELLUM

No Byzan- In treating of the non-literary papyri it has been shown
of"uterary ^^^* *^^ Roman period is followed by an equally long and
papyri. prolific period, to which the name of Byzantine has been
given. But in the sphere of literary papyri there is no
Byzantine period. It is true that a certain number of
literary texts upon papyrus have been, at various times,
located between the fourth and the seventh centuries;
but reason has been shown in the previous chapter for
transferring some of these to much earlier dates, while
those which remain are, as will be seen presently, few
and unimportant. Indeed the student who is acquainted
with the principal extant papyri will already have re-
cognized that hardly any of them still remain to be
dealt with. The explanation is not to be found in any
scarcity of papyrus as a writing material. The masses
of documents of the sixth and seventh centuries which
have been found in Egypt are sufficient to disprove any
such theory. The cause is different, and is to be found
in the successful rivalry of another material, namely
parchment or vellum.
Early use The beginnings of the use of vellum are to be found
o ve um. jjj^^gjj^ earlier, and are recorded in the standard works
on palaeography. Without discussing the precise value
of the story which tells of its invention in Pergamum

THE TRANSITION TO VELLUM 113

in the second century before Christ, or the reference by
Cicero to the use of bL(j)9epai'^, it is clear from Martial's
Apophoreta that vellum was considerably used as a writing
material in the second century of our era. It seems
certain, however, that at this time it was generally
regarded as inferior to papyrus. It was used for note-
books, or for rough copies of literary compositions; and
if, as Martial shows, copies of classical authors, such as
Homer, Virgil, Livy, and Ovid, were sometimes made on
vellum, they were common and cheap reproductions, better
to give away to clients and hangers-on than to keep as
ornaments of a good library.

The earliest extant example of writing upon vellum Fragment
is perhaps a specimen of this very class of book. It is gtheneson
a somewhat recent acquisition of the British Museum, vellum,
consisting of two small leaves of vellum, with two columns
to each page, containing part of Demosthenes' speech De
Falsa Legatione^. This fragment was found in Egypt,
and though the exact circumstances of its discovery are
not known, it came to Europe among a large collection
of papyri, the majority of which belonged to the Roman
period. The hand in which it is written bears a decided
resemblance to that of the Herodas papyrus. It is quite
unlike any known vellum hand, and we are therefore
justified in regarding it as belonging to the period to
which its appearance seems to assign it, namely, about
the second century. It may thus fall within the period
at which Martial was writing, and it corresponds very
well to what has been said of the character of the
vellum MSS. mentioned by the poet. It is plainly not
an elaborately written copy. There is nothing of the
appearance of an edition de luxe, as in the Vatican or
Sinaitic MSS. of the Bible, or the Palatine and Medicean

' Epp- ad Ait. xiii. 24. See Thompson, pp. 35-37, for a summary of the
data on this subject.

' Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 34473 ; text and description in Journal of Philology,
xxii. 247 (1894).

I

114 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Virgils. It may well have been regarded as an inferior
class of book to the best papyrus MSS. of the period.
Absence of For the present, this example stands alone, and there
papyri^ is every reason to suppose that to the end of the third
after third century papyrus held its own, at any rate in Egypt, as
^' the material on which literary works were written. But
when we come to the fourth century the situation is
changed. For non-literary purposes, as has been shown
above, the Roman period is succeeded by a Byzantine
period, equally long and equally prolific, lasting well
into the seventh century. Literary palaeography, how-
ever, has no Byzantine period, so far as papyri are con-
cerned. It cannot be due to accident that scarcely any
literary works on papyrus .have come down to us which
can reasonably be assigned to dates between the fourth
and seventh centuries. It is true that there have been
periods which, until quite lately, were unrepresented
among extant papyri; but the cases are not parallel.
In those instances no papyri at all of the periods in
question had been discovered; which merely meant that
the spade of the explorer had not hit upon any site of
that particular date. In the case of the Byzantine period,
on the contrary, not hundreds merely, but thousands
of papyri have been found, which now choke the libraries
of Berlin and Vienna; yet among these scarcely one
contains literary work, and the few that do are palpably
not written by professional scribes for the public market.
It is, therefore, a fair conclusion that papyrus was not
at that date being used so freely for literary purposes
as it had been during the Roman period.
Vellum This inference from the negative argument of the

the fourth absence of literary papyri later than the third century
century, jg confirmed by positive evidence from the other side.
The fourth century is the date to which our earliest
extant vellum MSS. (the above-mentioned Demosthenes
excepted) are assigned; and though the grounds for this

THE TRANSITION TO VELLUM 115

ascription are not quite so conclusive as one could wish,
they are sufficient to justify a fair amount of confidence.
The MSS. in question include the Vatican and Sinaitic
Codices in Greek, the Codex Vercellensis of the Old Latin
Bible, the Codices Palatinus, Romanus, Vaticanus, and
Sangallensis of Virgil, and possibly the Bembine Terence.
The period of transition is further marked by the well-
known statement of Jerome, that Acacius and Euzoius
(towards the end of the fourth century) caused a number
of damaged volumes in the famous library of Pamphilus
at Caesarea to be replaced by copies upon vellum. The
language employed by him^ implies that this was a
deliberate and systematic attempt to renovate the library ;
and the adoption of vellum in place of papyrus indi-
cates that the victory of the former material had been
gained by this time. It is consequently certain that the
introduction of vellum had begun at a considerably earlier
date. Finally, the evidence is clinched by the statement
of Eusebius that the emperor Constantine, after his
acceptance of Christianity, ordered fifty copies of the
Scriptures to be prepared on vellum for use in the churches
of Constantinople. When an emperor, on so special an
occasion, orders vellum copies for the churches of his
capital, in the beautifying of which no expense had been
spared, we may be confident that vellum was by that time
regarded as the best material for literary purposes.

It does not follow that papyrus was at once and alto- -^ few
gether extinguished by the victory of vellum, and there mss. of

remain a few MSS. to be mentioned which appear to ^°^\^\

^ '- century

belong to the fourth or later centuries. In no case, how- or later.
ever, are they documents of much palaeographical im-
portance. A very long magical papyrus at Paris ^, and

' 'Quam [bibliothecam] ex parte cormptam .... in membranis
instaurare conati sunt' (£p. 141).

^ Specimen facs. in Omont's Facsimiles desplus andens Manuscrits Grecs, . .
de la Bibliothegue Rationale, plate i.

I a

ii6 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

a less long one in the British Museum ^ have been
assigned to the fourth century, though there is no direct
evidence to fix their date. They are written in book
form, on rather narrow pages (as in the case of the
papyrus of Iliad ii-iv, which has been assigned above
to the third century), and the writing slopes somewhat;
but it is not quite of the same type as the sloping hands
of the third century. It is a rounder, thicker, harder
hand, and its appearance suggests the possibility of the
writer having been familiar with vellum MSS. Further,
the text is written on both sides of the leaf, unlike the
Homer papyrus mentioned above ; and this again seems
to indicate the influence of vellum. On the whole, the
case is one on which the only safe plea is that of ignorance ;
but such indications as there are seem to point to the
fourth century rather than the third. The contents of
both documents are strongly coloured by Gnosticism, but
so intermixed with other elements that it is not at all
likely that they were written during the flourishing time
of that philosophy; while mistakes are so frequent as
to show that they are somewhat unintelligent copies, and
not original works. So far, therefore, as the contents
are concerned, there is nothing to discredit the date that
has generally been assigned to these MSS.
Psalter Of more interest is a papyrus Psalter in the British

Museum. Muscum ^, as to the age of which exceedingly different views
have been held. It consists of thirty-two leaves, rather
short and square in shape, containing Psalms x-xxxiv,
written in an irregular sloping hand. Tischendorf, who
first published its text, regarded it as earlier than any
vellum MS. in existence ; but there is no reason to suppose
that he had ever given much attention to the palaeography

' Pap. XLVi ; facs. in Atlas accompanying vol. i. of Greek Papyri in the
British Museum^ plates xxxvi — xlix.

^ Pap. XXXVII ; specimen facs. in Cat. of Anc. MSS. {Greek), plate xii ; Pal.
Soc. i. 38.

THE TRANSITION TO VELLUM 117

of papyri, nor was there then sufficient evidence extant
to enable him to form an opinion. The editors of the
Palaeographical Society at first left it as early as the
fourth or fifth century, but subsequently brought it
down to the sixth or seventh; and there is little doubt
that the later date is correct. The hand is not that of
a trained scribe at all, and is not of the literary type.
It is not in the least like the sloping hand which we
have assigned to the third century. It is closely akin
to the non-literary hands of the late Byzantine period,
described in Chapter III. It will be remembered that
a sloping hand comes into use for non-literary documents
towards the end of the sixth century, and continues
into the seventh ; and it is to this class of hands that
the Psalter in question belongs. It is of some importance
to fix the date, on account of the interest that would
attach to the MS. if Tischendorf's claim could be made
good; but its palaeographical importance is not great.

So far, the late papyrus hands have had no direct Britisii
and close connexion with the contemporary vellum hands. Hesiod!^
There are, however, some cases in which there is a con-
siderable resemblance. The earliest, in all probability, of
such MSS. is a fragment of Hesiod in the British
Museum^, written in a large uncial hand of the same
general type as the Codex Alexandrinus. It is an up-
right hand, square in formation and well-rounded, but
difiering from the second century MSS., of which the
same description has been given, in the thickness and
coarseness of the writing. This does not appear to be
due to a lack of skill on the part of the scribe, but to
be the result of deliberate intention. It is rather an
imitation of the earlier hand at a time when the light-
ness of touch, so necessary for good writing upon papyrus,
had been lost; and consequently there seems to be no

' Pap. CLix ; text in Revue de Philologie, xvi. 181.

ii8 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

reason for separating it from the vellum hands to which
it appears, prifna facie, to be akin.
The Another papyrus, reproducing even more evidently

St. Cyril, the writing of contemporary vellum MSS., is a MS. at
Dublin which contains some portions of the treatise De
Adoratione of St. CyriP. It is written in page-form
in a good-sized uncial hand of the type that is generally
called Coptic. It is especially marked by the upright
A and the deeply curved M (AA), which are found in
a few vellum MSS., such as the Codex Zacynthius and
the Codex Marchalianus. These MSS. are generally
assigned to the sixth or seventh century, and the papyrus
of Cyril may reasonably be placed in the same period.
In a very similar hand is the fragment of a Festal Letter
from a patriarch of Alexandria to his clergy, which was
obtained by Mr. Grenfell in 1895-6, and of which the
date is probably a. d. 577 ^.
Papyrus of The last MS. that need be mentioned in this connexion
Prophets. ^^ o'^® ^^ ^^^ prophets Zechariah and Malachi, which
was formerly (and probably is still) in the possession
of a Viennese dealer, Theodor Graf. It was exhibited
at the London Oriental Congress of 1893, with the state-
ment that its date was in the second century^- This
date is, however, wholly impossible. The MS. is really
of the same type as the last, but larger, rougher, and
more irregular. It is a large, coarse uncial hand, written
on pages of a good size. The leaves are bound together
into quires by pieces of string. The seventh century is
probably quite as early a date as it is entitled to claim,
and, like the Cyril MS., it falls rather outside the domain
of papyrus palaeography. The material on which it is
written is indeed papyrus, but the writing is that which

' Published with facsimile in Transactions of the Soyai Irish Academy, vol.
xxix, pt. xviii, by the Kev. J. H. Bernard.

^ Published with facsimile in Grenfell and Hunt's Greek Papyri, vol.
ii ; now Pap. nccxxix in the British Museum.

' A rough facsimile was given in the Times during the Congress.

THE TRANSITION TO VELLUM 119

belongs properly to vellum. It shows a late stage in the
transition from papyrus to vellum, when the victory of the
latter had been won, though the Coptic Church continued
for some centuries to use the ancient material for its ver-
nacular Bible, and also, to some extent, for Greek copies
of the Scriptures also.

Conversely, there are one or two MSS. which show upon Vellum
vellum a style of writing to which we are accustomed only Jf^^ 'j-Jj"
in papyri. The first of these, the fragment of Demosthenes' style.
De Falsa Legatione, has been described already: the
other which seems to deserve notice is the MS. of the
Gospel and Revelation of Peter, discovered at Akhmim
in 1886 and published in 1893^- This has been assigned
to the eighth century by some palaeographers, including
the very high authority of M. Omont ; but in truth there
is no even approximate parallel to it among vellum MSS.
Its kinsmen must be found in the Byzantine papyri of the
sixth and seventh centuries, especially the former, as they
have been described in Chapter III; and there seems to
be no reason for declining to give this date to the Peter MS.
It is confirmed by the other contents of the same volume,
which are written in hands more closely conforming to
the vellum type, and apparently of the sixth century.

Instances such as these, however, whether of vellum The
MSS. written in papyrus hands, or of papyrus MSS. t^^elium.
in hands which belong properly to vellum, are so scarce
as to be plainly exceptional, the natural concomitants
of a period of transition. The general conclusion seems
certain, that about the fourth century papyrus ceased to be
the normal material for works of literature, and its
place was taken by vellum. Of course this change of
material involved a certain amount of change in the style of
writing ; but the general type remained the same, or rather,
developed only in an ordinary manner and at an ordinary

' Full facsimile by the French Mission Arch^ologique at Cairo ; also by
Gebhardt.

120 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

rate. The earliest vellum MSS. carry on the traditions
of the Roman style of writing upon papyrus. The only
change that is apparent is one in the direction of greater
care and precision. The scribes found that the new
material lent itself very easily to a handsome style of
writing ; and they consequently abandoned the somewhat
slovenly sloping style which had come in during the third
century, and modelled themselves on the earlier and
more careful writing of the first and second centuries.
The resemblance of the Sinaitic and Vatican codices
to papyrus MSS. has been noticed more than once. Not
only in the narrow columns, arranged four or three on
a page, and showing eight or six at each opening of the
book, but also in the hands themselves, there is a very
real resemblance to papyri of the best Roman period.
The Vatican MS. recalls such a papyrus as the British
Museum Odyssey, or that which contains books xiii, xiv
of the Iliad; the Sinaitic MS. reminds one still more
strongly of the great Hyperides papyrus. The chief varia-
tion is in the increased thickness of the heavier strokes,
which are differentiated from the light strokes far more
than was natural on the comparatively delicate papyrus;
though this tendency actually reacts upon the papyri
written after the vellum period had set in, and accounts
for the greater heaviness and thickness mentioned above
as characteristic of such papyri.
The dates The question is sometimes asked whether the evidence
early derivable from papyri does not modify our views as
vellum to the dates of the early vellum uncials. It has been

uncials. 1 • ,1 T ,

shown m the precedmg chapter that a hand of the same
general type as that of the vellum MSS. is found on
papyrus as early as the end of the first century. Is it
not possible that the great MSS. of the Greek Bible are
earlier than they have hitherto been supposed to be ?
It is impossible to argue the question fully here, since
its decision rests largely upon details not properly palaeo-

THE TRANSITION TO VELLUM

graphical, such as the presence or absence of certain
divisions of the text of the New Testament (the Eusebian
canons, the Ammonian sections, the Euthalian divisions of
the Acts) ; but it may be stated that the palaeographical
evidence does not require any departure from the dates
which have become traditional. In the case of the Codex
Alexandrinus, the presence of a treatise of Athanasius
(attached to the Psalms) precludes a date earlier than
the latter part of the fourth century; while the Codex
Sinaiticus has two notes or colophons which contain
references to the library of Pamphilus at Caesarea — a
library only formed at the beginning of the fourth
century. On the other hand, the style of the beginning
of the sixth century is fixed by the Vienna MS. of Dios-
corides written for Juliana Anicia, daughter of Flavins
Anicius Olybrius, who was emperor in the west in a. d. 472.
A fuller discussion of this subject would belong rather
to an essay on vellum-palaeography; but the facts here
summarized show that the dates of the early Bible uncials
do not rest upon palaeographical considerations alone,
and are too firmly fixed to be afiected by the evidence
of the papyri. The same cannot be said of the very
fine MS. of Homer, with illustrations, now at Milan 1.
The hand of this has a particularly early appearance ; and
though it would be rash to express a definite judgement
merely on the strength of a few facsimiles, it is worth
while suggesting a doubt whether this MS. may not be
considerably older than the fifth century, the .date to which
it is now assigned.

The conclusion, therefore, to which the evidence leads
is that the literary tradition passed wholly from papyrus
to vellum in the fourth century, the exceptions in either
direction being too few and too unimportant to require
much notice. It appears, further, that the hands of the
early vellum uncials are the direct descendants of the
' Specimen facsimiles in Pal. Soc. i. 39, 40, 50, 51.

122 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

hands found in literary papyri, especially those of the first

and second centuries. The results of this revolution are

not solely of palaeographical importance. They have also

had a bearing on literary history, and have fundamentally

aflFected our present knowledge of ancient literature.

Results of So long as papyrus was the material, and the roll the
the change p . j tj. -j. • ^\.^

frompapy- lorm, m common use tor uterary purposes, it was impossible

rus to ^ include works of very great extent in a single volume.

Very large rolls were cumbersome to use, and perhaps

were liable to be torn more easily than those which

were lighter and shorter ; in any case, as has been shown

in an earlier chapter, a length of ao to 30 feet is the

greatest to which a single roll attains, while most of those

which are now extant must have been considerably shorter.

Consequently works of any great length could not be

contained in a single roll, but had to be divided into

a number of rolls. No papyrus roll of Homer hitherto

discovered contains more than two books of the Iliad^.

Three short orations fill the longest extant roll of Hy-

perides. The 'A6rivai<av IloXtreia occupies no less than four

rolls, though these, it is true, are of very small dimensions.

A single play, a single long oration, would be enough

to fill an ordinary roll. In the domain of sacred literature,

the four Gospels and the Acts must each have occupied

a separate roll; and no complete New Testament was

possible until vellum came into use. It is obvious that

conditions such as these favour selection among the works

of an author. The ordinary literary student would not

possess a complete Aeschylus or Sophocles, but only his

favourite plays ; and, since opinion tends to run in similar

directions, some plays would be very much more in request

than others. It is this fact that accounts for the state

' There is perhaps an exception to this rule in a papyrus recently
discovered by Mr. Grenfell, and now in the Bodleian, the fragments
of which contain lines from books xxii, xxiii, and xxiv. This MS. is in
the small hand of the third century b. c, which would admit of a great
amount of text in a roll of ordinary size.

THE TRANSITION TO VELLUM 123

in which the tragedians have come down to us. We
have only a small proportion of their plajj^s, but we have
all that were most admired in antiquity. The meaning
of this is that, at the time when vellum came into use
and large collections became possible, the great majority
of the dramas had already become scarce, and consequently
few save those which we now possess were transcribed
into vellum codices. We can imagine a similar state of
things if the plays of Shakespeare had continued for two
or three centuries, or even more, to circulate only in their
original quarto form, where each play occupies a single
volume, instead of being collected into the folios shortly
after his death. In that case posterity would, no doubt,
possess Hamlet, Macbeth, As You Like It, and Much Ado
about Nothing; but it is highly probable that Ti/mon
of Athens, All's Well that Ends Well, Pericles, and Titus
Andronicus would have been lost, or would survive only
in fragments.

Other causes no doubt co-operated largely in determining
the survival or disappearance of the various works of
ancient literature. The stream of time, though far from
acting as Bacon, in a pessimistic frame of mind, declared,
has yet been singularly capricious in its choice of the
cargoes which it has brought safely down to us. But
among the conditions which have exercised an important
influence upon its operations are, beyond doubt, the use
of papyrus and of the roll-form as the vehicle of literary
tradition for six centuries after the great Attic period,
and its supersession by vellum, and by the modern book-
shape or codex, in the fourth century of our era.

The influence of papyrus palaeography does hot, however. The

end here. For non-literary purposes, for the ordinary jj^nd on ^

occasions of daily life, papyrus continued to be used yellum

I • 1 , J • T-i 1 1 ±1 developed

almost exclusively, at any rate m Jigypt, and apparently from late

elsewhere, for several centuries after its practical dis- ^^^■^g"^

appearance from the literary field. The development of

124 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

cursive writing for private and business purposes runs
its regular course, as has been traced in the third chapter
of this essay, until the seventh, or even the eighth century.
Then our evidence ceases, through the accidental fact that
the use of Greek was about that time obliterated in the
only country from which materials for this department
of palaeography are derivable. But common sense tells
us that elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world — in Con-
stantinople, in Athens, in Asia Minor — Greek cursive
writing continued to be used for every-day purposes,
whether upon papyrus or (as no doubt was increasingly
the case after the severance of Egypt from the Empire)
on vellum. The stream runs underground for a space,
but it reappears at the time of the palaeographic revolution
of the ninth century, when minuscules superseded uncials
as the current book-hand. As has been briefly stated by
Wilcken i, in a sort of obiter dictum, the minuscule of the
tenth century is the descendant of the papyrus-cursive
of the seventh. The interval of time is so considerable
that very close resemblances are hardly to be expected,
especially since the tenth-century hand was a refined
and idealized reproduction of its archetype; but the
resemblance is quite traceable. The forms of letters in
the late Byzantine papyri are already approaching those
of the vellum minuscule; and when they are written
small, as in the receipts and accounts of the seventh
century, the resemblance is still more apparent. 77 has
developed its h-shape, and jx has its long perpendicular
tail; V has its familiar v-shape, and v has lost its tail
and become a simple curve; a, 8, e, and indeed most
of the letters, approximate to the forms in which we
know them now. In the better examples there is even
something of the sharpness and precision which mark
the early vellum minuscules. They are not, it is true,
nearly so beautiful as the MSS. of the tenth century

' In the Introduction to his Tafeln.

THE TRANSITION TO VELLUM 125

— the perfection of Greek minuscule writing — but they
show plainly that they stand in the line of their ancestry.

It is so that, for the first time, the minuscule hand
enters the line of literary tradition. The hand which
for fifteen hundred years had been confined, so far as
its proper use was concerned, to accounts, wills, and other
such legal and private documents, and had only acci-
dentally, as it were, become at times the vehicle of
literature, now, in an improved and purified form, becomes
the regular repository of literary works. The minuscule
hand, even in its most cursive manifestations, is as old
as the set uncial, so far at least as our records go back,
and comes down side by side with it, though confined
to less dignified functions. But at the last, when the
uncial hand was exhausted, and could no longer supply
the needs of increasing literary demands, the minuscule
hand came forward to take its place, and to carry on the
torch of literature for the five hundred years that still
remained before the invention of the printing-press.

So, up to the end, the influence of papyrus remains
traceable. Its immediate literary function was over when
its book-hand gave birth to the vellum uncials of the
fourth century; but its non-literary hand carried on
a tradition which was to claim its place in literature
six hundred years afterwards. Then its duties were at
an end, and it is only in its remote descendants that
it still survives, in the Greek types of to-day, which have
been imitated or developed from the written hands of the
Middle Ages.

APPENDIX I

ALPHABETS OF LITERARY PAPYRI

The following table gives the alphabets of the chief literary
papyri which have been described in the preceding pages.
They are arranged in what is believed to be their chronological
order, though in the cases of MSS. of the first and second
centuries this order must be regarded as only approximate.
In the process of reproduction the size of the letters has been
slightly reduced throughout. The following are the MSS.
from which the alphabets are taken.

1. Literary fragments (Grenfell and Hunt, Gk. Pap. ii. i

=Brit. Mus. Pap. dclxxxviii). Early third century b. c.

2. Petrie Phaedo (Brit. Mus. Pap. cccclxxxyiii). Third

century b. c.

3. Petrie Antiope (Brit. Mus. Pap. cccclxxxv). Third

century b. c.

4. Dialectical Fragment (Louvre Pap. 2). Before 160 b. c.

5. Hyperides, In Athenogenem (in the Louvre). Second

century b. 0.

6. Bacchylides (Brit. Mus. Pap. dccxxxiii). First century

B. c.

7. Hyperides, In Philijopidem (Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxxii). First

century B. c.

8. Demosthenes, Ep. Hi. (Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxxiii). First

century b. c.

9. Herculaneum Pap. 152. First century b. c. Other

Hereulaneum MSS. have similar alphabets.
10. Homer, Biad xxiii, xxiv. (Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxviii). Late
first century b. c.

128 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

11. Petition (Brit. Mus. Pap. cccliv). Circ. lo b. c.

12. Homer, Odyssey iu. (Brit. Mus. Pap. colxxi). Circ. a. d. i.

13. Homer, Hiad xviii. (Harris Homer = Brit. Mus. Pap.

cvii). First century.

1 4. Hyperides, InBemostJienem, etc. (Brit. Mus. Papp. cviii, cxv).

Late first century.

15. Homer, Eiad xiii, xiv. (Brit. Mus. Pap. dccxxxii). First

century.

16. Homer, Iliad xxiv, (Bankes Homer = Brit. Mus. Pap.

cxiv). Second century.

17. Homer, Iliad ii. (Bodleian MS. Gr. class, a. 1 (P)).

Second century.

18. Homer, Uiad ii.-iv. (Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxvi). Third

century.

For the non-literary papyri, an excellent table of alphabets
will be found in Sir E. M. Thompson's HandbooTc to GreeJc and
Latin Palaeography.

ALPHABETS OF

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APPENDIX II

CATALOGUE OF LITEBARY PAPTEI

The following list was originally compiled independently,
but since its preparation a similar list has been published by
P. Couvreur in the Revue de PMlologie Ixx. 165), and another
by C. Haeberlin in the Centralllatt fur Bibliothekswesen (xiv. i,
2or, 263, 337, 389, 473), giving fuller details of the literature
relating to each MS. From these lists some references have
been taken ; but the magical papyri (the principal publications
of which are mentioned in App. Ill) and a few other non-
literary works included by Haeberlin are not given here.
The Oxyrhynchus papyri do not appear in either of the above-
mentioned lists. In the case of papyri not in the British
Museum, and of which no facsimile has been published, the
dates given are those assigned by their editors. Where none is
given, it will be understood that the editors have given none.

The following abbreviated references are used in this list :

Gat. of Additions = G3,ta\ogae of Additions to the Department of MSS.,

British Museum (published every six years).
Cat. of Anc. Greek JfSS. = Catalogue of Ancient MSS. in the British

Museum ; part I, Greek. Edited by Thompson and Warner (1881).
Class. Texts — Classical Texts from Papyri in the British Museum ;

ed. Kenyon (1891).

F. or #w/j7-er = ruhrer duroh die Ausstellung der Papyrus Erzherzog
Eainer ; GreeJc section edited by Wessely (1894).

G. P. = Greek Papyri ; vol. i by Grenfell (1896), vol. ii by Grenfell and
Hunt (1897).

Mitth. or Miah. Erzh. ifamer =Mittheilungen aus der Sammlung der
Papyrus Erzherzog Eainer.

K

I30 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Notices et Extraiis = 'Notices et Extraits des Manuserits de la Bibliothfeque

ImpSriale et autres Bibliothfeques, vol. xviii (1865).
0. P. =Oxyrhynchus Papyri ; ed. Grenfell and Hunt (part i, i8g8).
P. P. = Petrie Papyri ; ed. Mahaffy, two vols. (1891 and 1893).
PhU. ^n«ejg. =Philologisoher Anzeiger (separate publication of Philo-

logus) '.
Bev. de Phil. = Eevue de Philologie.
Rhein. Mus. = Eheiniscbes Museum.

ra/e!n = Tafeln zur alteren griechischen Palaograpbie; ed. Wilcken (1891).
Wien. SiM(2. = Wiener Studien.
Zeitschr.f. ag. SpmcAe = Zeitschrift fur agyptisehe Sprache.

AeseMnes, In Ctesiphontem, §§ 178-186. Fifth century.

Eainer Coll. Mentioned by Karabacek, Mitth. JSrzh. Bainer,

i. 51-
Aeschylus, Cari(ms{?); frag, ('fifteen lines). Before b. c. 161.

Did ot Papyrus. Weil, Monuments Grecs (1879), with facs.
— Myrmidons i^) ; frag, (eight lines). Before b.c. 161. Didot

Pap. Ed. Weil, with facs.
Alcidamas, Movo-eiov ; fragment. Third century b. c. Brit.

Mus. Pap. ccccxcix. Mahaffy, P. P. i. 25, with, facs.

Aleman, frag, of a lyric poem ; portions of three columns.

First century. Louvre Pap. 71. "Eggev, Memoir es d' Hist.

anc. et de Philol. 1863, p. 159 ; facs. in atlas to Notices et

Extraits, xviii., pi. 50.
Alcmau (?), seven hexameter lines, three being imperfect, in

Aeolo-Doric dialect. First or second century. Grenfell

and Hunt, 0. P. i. 8, with facs.
Apollonius, Homeric Lexicon ; fragment. Late first century.

Bodl. MS. Gr. class, e. 44 (P). Facs. by Nicholson.

Apollonius Ehodius; fragment. Eainer Coll. Mentioned
in Phil. Anzeig. xv. 650.

' A number of literary fragments among the Kainer papyri are briefly
mentioned in various short notices in the Philologischer Anzeiger for 1884-6 ;
but it has seemed best not to include these, except vfhen they are fairly
explicit. It is possible that mistakes were made in the first identifications,
and until fuller details are published these fragments cannot be considered
available for practical purposes.

APPENDIX II 131

Aratus, Phaenomena ; two fragments, in book form. Berl.
Pap. Blass, Zeitschr. f. ag. SpracJie, 1880.

Aristophanes, Birds logy-ioSi, 1101-1127, Louvre Pap.
Weil, Bev. de Phil. 1882.

Aristotle : —

'A6rjvaLu>v IIoXtTeta. End of first century. Brit. Mus. Pap.
cxxxi verso. Ed. Kenyon, 1891, with facs. ; subsequent
editions by Ferrini, Kaibel and Wilamowitz, Herwerden
and van Leeuwen, Blass, Sandys.

'AOrjvaimv lioXireCa, two fragg., in book foi;m. Fourth cen-
tury (?). Berl. Pap. 5009. Blass, Bhein. Mus. 1880;
Dials, Abh. d. Berl. Akad. 1885, with hand-made facs.

Post. Analytics, i. 7iBig — 72A38;in book form. Seventh
century (?). Berl. Pap. 166. Landwehr, PMlologus, xliv. 21
(1885).

Aristoxenus (?), pvOfuKo. o-roixeta, portions of five columns.
Third century. Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 9, with partial
facs.

Baeehylides, Odes ; incomplete. First century b. c. Brit. Mus.
Pap. Dccxxxiii. Ed. Kenyon (1897), vrith facs. ; sub-
sequent editions by Blass and Jurenka (1898).

Basil, -E^. V. 77 E, vi. 79 b, ccxciii. 432 b, cl. 239 c,
ii. 72 A. Fifth century (?). Berl. Pap. Blass, Zeitschr.
f. ag. Sprache, 1880; Landwehr, PMlologus, 1884 (with a
facsimile).

Bible :—

Psalms xii. 7 — xv. 4. Late third century. Brit. Mus. Pap.
ccxxx, Athenceum, Sept. 8, 1894, with facs.

— xi. 2 — xix. 6, xxi. 14 — xxxv. 6, in book form. Seventh
century. Brit. Mus. Pap. xxxvii. Tischendorf, Mon. Sac.
Ined., nov, coll. i. 217; specimen facs. in Cat. of Anc.
Greek MSS.

xl. 16 — xli. 4, in book form. Berl. Pap. Blass, Zeitschr.

f. cig. Sprache, i88i.

K 2

132 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Bible

Song of Solomon i. 6-9, in book form. Seventh or eighth
century. Bodl. MS. Gr. Bibl. g. i (P). Grenfell, G. P.
i. 7-

Isaiah xxxviii. 3-5, 13-16. Third century. Eainer Pap.
8024 {Fuhrer, 536).

Eeehiel v. 12 — vi. 3, in book form. Late third century.
Hexaplar symbols. Bodl. MS. Gr. Bibl. d. 4 (P). Grenfell,
a. P. i. 5.

Zechariah iv — Malachi ?, in book form. Seventh century (?).
Graf papyrus. Hechler, Times, Sept. 7, 1892, with speci-
men facs.

Matthew i. 1-9, 12, 14-20. One leaf of a book. Third
century. Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 2, with facsimile.

— XV. 12-16, fragment, Greek and Coptic, in book form.
Sixth century. Eainer Coll. Mentioned by Gregory in
Tischendorf's Novum Testamentum Graece iii. 450 (1884).

— xviii, fragment, in book form (?). Eainer Coll. Fourth or
fifth century. Mentioned by Gregory, ib.

MarJc XV. 29-38, in book form (?\ Fourth century. Eainer

Coll. Mentioned by Gregory, ib.
LuJce V. 30 — vi. 4, in book form (attached to MS. of Philo,

vid.infr.). Fourth century. Paris, Bibl. Nat. &ohei[,Mdm.

de la Mission Arch. Frangaise au Caire, tom. 9 (1893), with

facs.

— vii. 36-43, X. 38-42, in book form. Sixth century.
Eainer Pap. 8021 (F. 539).

Johni. 29, in book form (?). Seventh century. Eainer Coll.
Mentioned by Gregory, ubi supra.

I Corinthians i. 17-20, vi. 13-18, vii. 3, 4, 10-14, imperfect,
in book form. Fifth century (?). At Kiew, Uspensky
Coll. Gregory, qp. eit. iii. 344.

— i. 25-27, ii. 6-8, iii. 8-10, 20, in book form. Fifth cen-
tury. At SinaL Eendel Harris, Biblical fragments from
Mt. Sinai {i8go).

APPENDIX II 133

Bible (fiontinued^ ■ —

Vneanonical Gospel ; very small frag., parts of seven lines.

Third century (?), Eainer Coll. Bickell, Mitth. Ereh.

Bainer, i. 52 (1887), with facs.
Logia lesu ; one leaf of a book. Third century. Egypt

Exploration Fund. Ed. Grenfell and Hunt (1897), with

facs. ; also in 0. P. i. i .
Chronological Treatise; fragment, portions of six columns,

covering b. c. 355-315. Third century. Grenfell and

Hunt, 0. P. i. 12.
Cyril of Alexandria, De Adoratione, p. 242 e — 250 d, with

lacunas, 286 b, in book form. Sixth or seventh century.

Dublin Pap. Bernard, Boyal Irish Acad. xxix. pt. 18, with

partial facs.
Demetrius ; , philosophical works among Herculaneum papyri.

First century b. c. See Scott, Fragmenta Herculanensia.

Demosthenes : —

In Aristocratem, lexicon to ; fragment. Fifth century (?).
Berl. Pap. Blass, B^ermes, xvii. 148.

Be Corona, p. 308, small fragment. Third century, Grenfell
and Hunt, 0. P. i. 25, with facs.

Epistle III, wanting end. First century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap.
cxxxiii. Kenyon, Class. Texts, p. 56, with specimen facs.

De Falsa Legatione, § 10, imperfect. First or second century.
Bodl. MS. Gr. class, f. 46 (P). Grenfell and Hunt,
G. P. ii. 9.

Contra Leptinem, §§ 84-91, with lacunas. First or second
century. Berl. Pap. 5879. Wilcken, Tafelrn, i.

In Meidiam, §§ 41, 42. Fourth or fifth century. In
possession of Mr. F. Cope Whitehouse. Proceedings of
Society of Biblical Archaeology, xv. 86, with facs.

In Meidiam : hypothesis and part of commentary. Late
first century. Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxxi verso. Kenyon,
'A$rjv(uu)v TloXiTela ed. 3, appendix i, with facs.

In Meidiam, lexicon to : fragment. Eainer Coll. Men-
tioned by Karabacek, Mitth. Erzh. Bainer, i, 51 {1886).

134 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Demosthenes {continued) : —

Olynthiacs II, fragments from §§ lo, 15. First-second
century. In library of Eossall School. Kenyon, Class.
Rev. vi. 430 ; facs. above, pi. XVI.

Third Philippic, fragment. Egypt Exploration Fund. Hogarth
and Grenfell, E. E. F. Archaeological Report, 1895-6, p. 17.

Contra Phormionem, §§ 5-7, imperfect. Second century. Bodl.
MS. Gr. class, f. 47 (P). Grenfell and Hunt, G. P. ii. 10.

TLpooifua Ar;fj,7]yopLKd, §§ 26-29, parts of seven columns. First
or second century. Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 26, with
facs.

Dialectical Treatise, With quotations from Hoiner, Sappho,
Alcman, Anacreon, Ibycus, Thespis, Timotheus, Euripides,
&c. : fourteen columns, imperfect. Before b. c. 160. Louvre
Pap. 2. Letronne, Notices et Extraits, xviii. 77, with facs.
in atlas, pi. xi.

Dioseorides ; ten fragments in a chemical papyrus. Leyden
Pap. X. Leemans, Cat. of Leyden Papyri, ii. 205.

Drama : —

Anonymous : fragment, apparently of an ' Iphigenia,' begin-
nings of seventeen lines. Third century B.C. Brit. Mus.
Pap. ccccLxxxvi h. Mahaffy, P. P. i. 3 (2), with facs.

— parts of eighteen lines, apparently comedy. Third
century b. 0. Brit. Mus. Pap. occclxxxvii a. lb. i. 4 (i),
with facs.

— parts of twenty-eight lines, apparently tragedy. Third
century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. occclxxxvii h. lb. i. 4 (2),
with facs.

— parts of twenty lines. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus.
Pap. Dxc. Mahaffy, P. P. ii. 49 c.

— two small fragments. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus.
Pap. Dxci a. lb. ii. 49 d.

— two small fragments. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap.
DCLXxxviii a. Grenfell and Hunt, G. P. ii. i a, with facs.

APPENDIX II 135

Drama {continued) : —

Anonymous: very small fragment. Third century b. c.
Brit. Mus. Pap. dclxxxviii 6. Ih. ii. i h, with facs.

— four fragments. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap.
Dcxc. lb. ii. 6 a.

— fragment. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. dcxci a.
lb. ii. 6 b.

— two small fragments. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus.
Pap. DCXCI 6. Ih. ii. 6 c, with facs,

— two small fragments. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus.
Pap. Dcxciv. lb. ii. 8 b.

— fragment, fourteen lines. Before b. c. 161. Pap. Didot.
Weil, Monuments Grecs, with facs.

— fragment of comedy, parts of fifty lines. First or second
century. Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 11.

— fragment. Second century. Brit. Mus. Pap. cccclxxxiv d.
Unpublished.

— fragment of comedy, twenty lines, nine nearly perfect.
Second or third century. Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 10.

— parts of three or four columns, on subject of Jason.
Second or third century. Brit. Mus. Pap. clxxxvi verso.
Cat. of Additions, 1894.

— fragment. Late third century. Brit. Mus. Pap. dcxov a.
Grenfell and Hunt, 6r. P. ii. 12, with facs.

— fragment, ten lines. Berl. Pap. Blass, Zeitschr. f. dg.
Sprache, 1881.

Elegiac Poetry : —

Anonymous : fragment, parts of twenty-four lines. Third cen-
tury b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. dlxxxix. Mahaffy, P.P.ii. 49 a.

fragment, parts of eighteen lines. Second century.

Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 14-

Epic Poetry : —

Anonymous : two small fragments. Third century b. c.
Bodl. MS. Gr. class, f. 45 (P)- Grenfell and Hunt, G. P. ii. 5-

136 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Epic Poetry {continued) :-^
Anonymous : fragment. Second century. Brit. Mus. Pap.
ccccLxxxiv e. Unpublished.

— considerable fragments. Second-third' century. Brit. Mus.
Pap. coLxxiii. Cat. of Additions, 1894,

— fragment, fifty-four lines. Fourth century (?). At Lim-
erick (?). Bp. Graves, Hermatheiia, 1885, with facs.

— quotation, four lines. Fourth-fifth century. Paris, Bibl.
Nat. Wilcken, Sitzimgsberichte der Berl. Ahad., 1887.

— two fragments, on subject of Phineus. Eainer Coll.
Mentioned in Phil. Aneeig. xiv. 477.

— fragment, in book form. Fourth century. Berl. Pap.
5003. Stern, Zeitschr. f. ag. Sprache, i88i ; facs. in
Wilcken, Tafeln, v.

Epicharmus ; fragment, parts of four lines, from an antho-
logy. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. occolxxxvi a.
Mahaffy, P. P. i. 3 (i), with facs.

— 'OSvarcrev's avTOfioXo^, fragment, ten lines with commentary.
First or second century. Eainer Pap. 8023 (F. 537,withfacs.).

Epicurus, various works among Herculaneum papyri. First
century b. 0. Cf. Scott, Fragmenta Herculanensia.

Epigram, anonymous, on conquest of Egypt by Augustus.
Early first century. Brit. Mus. Pap, oolvi (2). Cat. of
Additions, 1894 ; Eev. de Phil xix. 177.

Epigrams ; collection by unknown authors, fragment. Third
century b. 0. Bodl. MS. Gr. class, e. 33 (P). Mahaffy,
P. P. a. 49 &, with facs.

— fragment of a collection. Third century. Grenfell and
Hunt, 0. P. i. 15.

Euclid, ii. 5. Third or fourth century. Grenfell and Hunt
O.P. i. 29. '

Eudoxus, astronomical treatise. Early second century b. c.
Louvre Pap. i. Brunet de Presle, Notices et ExtraHs, xviii.
25, with facs. in atlas, pi. i-x.

APPENDIX II 137

Euripides : —

.4 Mfiqpe, fragment from end of play, 123 lines. Third cen-
tury B. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. cccclxxxv. Mahaffy, P. P. i. i,
with facs.

■ — parts of three lines from an anthology. Third century
B. c. Brit. Mus.. Pap. cccclxxxvi a, Mahaffy, P. P. i.
3(1), with facs.

Medea, 11. 5-12. Before b. c. 161. Pap. Didot. Weil,
Monuments Grecs, with facs.

Orestes, 11. 339-343, with musical notes. Giro. a. d. i.
Eainer Pap. 8029 (P. 531, with facs.). Wessely, Mitth.
V. 65.

— 11. 1062-iogo. Cire. second century. Geneva Pap.
Nicole, Rev. de Phil. xix. 105.

[Euripides], Bhesus, 11. 48-96, in book form. Fourth-fifth cen-
tury. Paris, Bibl. Kat. WUcken, Sitzwngs'b. d. Berl. AJcad.
1887.

Euripides, Temenides (?), forty-four lines. Before b. c. 161.
Pap. Didot. WeU, Monuments Grecs, with facs.

Grammarian, anonymous ; fragment. First century. Eainer
Coll. Mentioned by Karabacek, Mitth. i. 51.

Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses ; extracts. Fifth centmry (?).
Berl. Pap. Blass, Zeitschr. f dg. Sprache, 1880.

Hermas, Pastor, Mand. xi. 9, with an additional passage.
Third-fourth century. Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 5
(c/. V. Bartlet, Athenceum, Oct. 8, 1898).

— Sim. iL 7-10, iv. 2-5. Third century. Berl. Pap. 5513.
Wilcken, Tafeln, iii, Diels and Harnack, Sitswngsb. d. Berl.
Ahad. 1891.

Herodas, Mimes ; incomplete. First-second century. Brit.
Mus. Pap. cxxxv. Kenyon, Glass. Texts, with specimen
facs. ; complete facs. in separate vol. Later editions by
Butherford, BUcheler, Crusius, Meister.

138 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Herodotus : —

i. 76. Second or third century. Grenfeil and Hunt, 0. P.
i. 19 verso,

— 105-6. Third century. Grrenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 18.

Hesiod : —

WorJcs and Bays, 11. 111-118, 153-161, 174-182, 210-221,
with four additional verses; in book form. Fifth century.
Geneva Pap. Mcole, Mcvl de Phil. xii. 113.

— 11. 251-266, 283-296, 313-329, 346-361, 686-709,718-
740, 748-812, 817-828.; Shield of Heracles, 11. 5-30,
434^440, 465-470 ; in book form. Circ. a. d. 400.
Eainer Coll. W«ssely, Mitth. i. 73.

Theogonia, 11. 75-145, in book form. Fourth-fifth century.
Paris, Bibl. Nat. Wilcken, Sitzungsb. d. Bed. Ahad., 1887.

— 11. 210-238,260-270. Fourth-fifth century. Brit. Mus.
Pap. cLix. Kenyon, Rev. dePhil. xvi. 181.

Hesiod (?), Eoeae (?) ; portions of six lines. Third century
B. o. Brit. Mus. Pap. cccctxxxvi c. Mahaffy, P. P. i.
3 (3), with facs.

History : —

Anonymous, fragments of collection of vofj-Lfm /Sap^apiKa.
Third century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. cocclxxxix. Mahafify,
P. P. i. 9-, with facs.

— ■ on Spartan training (■? a AaKc8ai/ioi/t<o]/ IIoXiTeta) ; fragment.
Second century. Brit. Mus. Pap. clxxxvii. Kenyon,
Rev. de Phil. xxi. i.

Homer : —

Hiad i. 37-54, 65-67, 207-22*5 ; on the verso of accounts.
Third oen!tury (?). Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxix. Kenyon,
Class. Texts, .p. 80.

— i. 44-60. Ojrc. second 'Century (?). Geneva Pap. Nicole,
Rev. de Phil, xviii. 103.

— i. 129-150. Second century. Brit, Mus. Pap. ccLxxir.
Cat. of Additions, 1894.

APPENDIX II 139

Homer (continued) : —

Iliad i. 273-362. Second century. Gizeh Museum (from
Egypt Exploration Fund). Unpublished (c/. Hogarth and
Grenfell, U. E. F. Archaeological Report, 1895-6, p. 16).

— i. 298-333. First or second century. Bodl. MS. Gr.
class, e. 58 (f). Unpublished.

— i. 506, 507; ii. 1-6, 45-49> m-nS, i55-i57> 200-205,
223-228, 245-252, 289-292, 331-337, 345-382, 391-404,
411-422, 433-446, 454-470, 472-486, 488-492, 494-510,
516-531, 538-560, 562-598, 601-621, 624-686, 692-731,
735-753, 755-841, 843-877; with few scholia and
Aristarchean symbols. Second century. Bodl. MS. Gr.
class, a. I (P). Petrie, Hawara, p. 24 ; ■specimen facs.
there and above, pi. XX.

— fragments of Iliad i, ii, iv, viii, xi, xvii. EainerColl.
Mentioned in Phil. Angeig. xvi> 414, 477.

— ii. 1 01 — iv. 40 (omitting ii. 494-877), in book form.
Third century. Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxvi. Kenyon, Class.
Texts, p. 81, with specimen f«,cs.

— ii. 730-828, with an additional line after 1. 798. Second
century. Grenfell and Hunt, O. P. i. 20, with pa-rtial facs.

— ii. 745-764, First or second «entury. Grenfell and
Hunt, O.P.I 21.

— iii. 317-337, 342-372; iv. 1-28, 56-69, 74-79, iii-'So,
159-192, 198-201, 208-245, 256-293, 303-3451 352-544;
on the verso of tax-register. Late first century. Brit. Mus.
Pap. cxxxvi. Kenyon, Class. Texts, p. 93, with specimen
facs.

— iv. 82-95. First-second -century (■?). G^ievaPa,p. Nicole,
Bev. de Phil, xviii. 103..

— iv. 1 09-1 13. Third centu-iy B.C. Brit. Mus. Pap.
DCLxxxix b. Grenfell aaid Hunt, 6f. P. ii. 3, with facs.

— iv. 191-219., omitting I96, 197, 215. Gizeh Museum.
Sayce, Academy, May 12, 1894.

— V. 731-734, 815-818, 846-850. Second century (?).
Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxvii (i). Kenyon, Class. Texts, p. 98.

I40 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Homer {continued) : —

Iliad vi. 1-39. First-second century. Louvre Pap. 3*^1.
Longp6rier, Notices et Extraits, xviii. izo, with facs. in
atlas, pi. xlix.

— vi: 90-100, 1 19-125. Second century (?). Brit. Mus.
Pap. cxxvii (2). Kenyon, Class. Texts, p. 98.

— vi. 327-353 ; on verso of business document. First-
second century (?). Geneva Pap. Nicole, Bev. de Phil.
xviii. 104.

— viii. 64-75, 96-116. First or second century. Bodl.
MS. Gr. class, d. 20 (P). Grenfell, G. P. i. 2.

— viii, a fragment. Second century b. c. Egypt- Exploration
Fund. Hogarth and Grenfell, K U. F. Archaeological
Report, 1895-6, p. 17.,

— viii. 217-219 (?),. 249-253,, with two additional lines.
Third century b. c, Brit. Mus. Pap. bclxxxix a. Grenfell
and Hunt, G-. P. ii. 2.

— viii. 433-447. Berl. Mus. Pap. 6845. Verzeichniss der
dgypt. Altert. p. 370.

— xi. 502-537, with five additional lines. Third century b. c.
Brit. Mus. Pap. cccclxxxvi A Mahaffy, P. P. i. 3 (4),
with facs.

— xi. 788— xii. 9, with thirteen additional lines. Second
century b. o. Geneva Pap. Nicole, Rev. de PMl. xviii.
104: facs. inSitzungsb. d. Berl. Ahad. 1894.

— xii. 178-198. Third century. Bodl. MS. Gr. class, e.
21 (P). Grenfell, G. P. i. 4.

— xiii. 26-47, 107-111, 149-173. First or second century.
Louvre Pap. 3. Brunet de Presle, Notices et Extraits,
xviii. 109, with facs. in atlas, pi. xii.

— xiiL 143-150. Second century. Vatican Pap.; part of
same MS. as the preceding. Comptes-rendus de VAcad.
des Inscr. 1893.

APPENDIX II 141

Homer {continued) : —

Hiadx^. i-io, 38-50, 73-87, 149-437, 456-653, 658-674,
740-747 ; xiv. 120-293, 322-394, 397-522, First century.
Brit. Mus. Pap. dccxxxii. Hunt, Journal of Philology,
xxvi. 25.

— xvii. 102-115, 142-152. Second century. Eainer Pap.
8027 (F. 533).

— xviii. 1-2 1 8, 3 1 1-6 1 7. First century. Brit. Mus. Pap.
cvii. Thompson and Warner, Cat. of Anc. MSS. ; facs.
in Pal. Soc. ii. 64.

— xviii. 1-22, 29-33, 77-92, 98-121, 125-136, 152-161,
168-175, 227-230, 273-275, 279-288, 320-349, 359-371,
387-394, 398-410, 412-425, 442-450, 455-465, 467-477,
479-492, 501-518, 534-543, 563-575, 578-617. Second
century (?). Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxvii (3). Kenyon, Class.
Texts, p. 98.

— xviii. 475-499, 518-535, 544-561. Second century.
Louvre Pap. 3^'^. Longperier, Notices et Extraits, xviii.
114, with facs. in atlas, pi. xlix.

— XX. 36-110. Second century. Gizeh Museum (from
Egypt Exploration Fund). Unpublished {cf. Hogarth
and Grenfell, E. E. F. Archaeological Eeport, 1895-6, p. 17).

— xxi. 387-399, 607-611; xxii. 33-38, 48-55, 133-135,
151-155, 160-262, 340-344; xxiii. 159-166, 195-200,
224-229 ; with additional lines. Third century b. c.
Bodl. MS. Gr. class, b. 3 (P). Grenfell and Hunt, G. P.
ii. 4, with specimen facs.

— xxi. 544-609 ; xxii. 390-435. Berl. Pap. Blass, Zeitschr.
f. ag. Sprache, 1880.

— xxiii. 1-79, 402-633, 638-897 ; xxiv. 1-83, 100-144,
150-243, 248-282, 337-341, 344-351, 382-387, 402-479,
490-520, 536-548, 559-579, 596-611, 631-657, 671-729,
^gY-743, 754-759 ; with a few scholia and Aristarchean
symbols. First century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxvm.
Kenyon, Glass. Tends, p. loo, with specimen facs., and
Journal of Philology, xxi. 296.

143 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Homer {continued) : —

J7mdxxiv. 127-804. Second century. Brit. Mus. Pap. cxiv.
Thompson and Warner, Cat. of Am. MS8., with facs.

Odyssey iii. 267-278, 283-294, 319-336, 352-366, 389-497,
with scholia. Early first century. Brit. Mus. Pap. cclxxi,
with some small fragments in Eainer Coll. Kenyon,
Journal of Philology, xxii ; specimen facs. in Pal. Soc. ii.
182 ; Wessely, Mitth. vi. i, with hand-made facs. of
Vienna fragments.

— iii. 364-375, 384-402. Geneva Pap. Nicole, Eev. de
Phil, xviii. loi.

— V. 346-3S3. Third century. Bodl. MS. Gr. class, g.
7 (P). Grenfell, G. P. i. 3.

— xiv. 15-24, 36-60, 71-86, 374-376, 378-381, 407-409,
430-441. Berl. Pap. 154 a. Landwehr, PMoZo^MS, xliv.
685.

— XV, fragment. Gizeh Museum. Sayce, Academy, May 1 2,
1894.

Homer : Lexicon to Hiad i ; fragment. Fifth century. Berl.

Pap. Wilcken, Sitmngsb. d. Berl. ATtad. 1887.
Homer : Commentary and paraphrase to Hiad i ; fragment.

Third-fourth century. Paris, Bibl. Nat. Wilcken, ib.

Homer : Paraphrase of Iliad iv ; fragment. Eainer Pap.
Mentioned in Phil. Anzeig. xiv. 44.
See also s. v. ApoUonius.

Hyperides : —

In Athenogenem ; imperfect. Second century b. c. Louvre
Pap. Ed. Eevillout, with facs. ; subsequent editions
by Weil, Herwerden, Blass, Kenyon, Vogt.

In Demosthenem, fragments ; Pro Lycophrone, imperfect ;
Pro Euxenippo. Late first century. Brit. Mus. Papp.
cviir, cxv (with fragments in Paris and at Eossall School).
Ed. Babington, with hand-made facs. ; other editions by
Sauppe, Boeckh, Schneidewin, Caesar, Cobet, Linder,
Comparetti, Blass.

APPENDIX II 143

Hyperides {continued) : —

Funeral Oration, imperfect. Second century. Brit. Mus.
Pap. xcviii verso. Ed. Babington, with hand-made facs. ;
subsequent editions by Sauppe, Kayser, Tell, Cobet,
Comparetti, Dehfeque, Caffiaux, Blass.

In Philippidem, imperfect. First century b. c. Brit. Mus.
Pap. cxxxiv. Ed. Kenyon, Class. Tends, with specimen facs. ;
subsequent editions by Weil, Herwerden, Blass, Kenyon.

Isocrates :

De Antidosi, §§ 83, 87, small fragment. First or second
century. Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 27.

Contra Nicoclem, §§ 1-30. Third century. Marseilles Pap.
Schoene, Melanges Graux, 481, with specimen facs.

— §§ 2-4, fragment. Fourth century. Eainer Pap. 8029
(F. 532). Wessely, Mitth. iv. 136 (1888).

De Pace, §§ 1-6 1 fragmentary, rest nearly perfect. First-
second century. Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxxii. Kenyon, Class.
Texts, p. 63, with specimen facs.

Philippus, §§ 1 1 4-1 1 7. First-second century. Eainer Pap.
Wessely, Mitth. ii. 74 (1887).

Isocrates : criticism of the Evagoras, anonymous. First-
second century. Eainer Pap. Wessely, Mitth. ii. 79
(1887).

Literary Criticism : —

Anonymous, on the names of the gods ; fragment. Second-
third century. Berl. Pap. 1970. Wilcken, Tafeln, ii.

— life of Aesop. One leaf of a book. Sixth century (?).
At St. Petersburg. Weil, Bev. de Phil. ix. 1 9.

Lives of Saints, anonymous ; lives of SS. Abraham and
Theodora, fragments. Louvre Papp. 7404-8 bis. Wessely,
Wien. Stud. 1889.

Lyric Poetry : —

Anonymous ; two small fragments. Third century b. c.
Brit. Mus. Pap. dcxciii. Grenfell and Hunt, G. P. ii. 8 a.

144 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Lyric Poetry (continued) : —

Anonymous ; fragment of imviKLov, twenty lines. Louvre
Pap. Egger, Comptes-rendus de I'Acad. des Inscr. 1877.

— portions of three columns. Second century. Egypt
Exploration Fund. Hogarth and Grrenfell, K E. F.
Archaeological Beport, 1895-6, p. 16.

Mathematics, anonymous ; fragment on mensuration of land.
First century. Ayer Papyrus. E. J. Goodspeed, Ameri-
can Journal of Philology, xix. 25, with facs.

Medicine : —

Anonymous ; treatise on diseases, with extracts from Menon's
latrica. First-second century. Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxxvii.
Ed. Diels, Supjplementum Aristotelicum, iii. i, with speci-
men facs. (1893).

— fragment, on dentistry &e. First-second century. Brit.
Mus. Pap. CLV. Cat. of Additions, 1894.

Menander, rccopyo'?, portions of one leaf, about eighty lines.

Fourth-fifth century {?). Ed. Nicole (1897), Grenfell

and Hunt (1898).
Mime, anonymous, in rhythmical prose or lyrical verse ;

imperfect. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. dov

verso. Grenfell, G. P. i. i, with facs.
Oratory : —

Anonymous ; fragment. First century. In Paris (?).

Egger, M6m. d'liist. anc. 175 (1863).

— remains of three rhetorical exercises, mutilated. Late
first century. Brit. Mus. Pap. cclvi verso. Cat. of
Additions, 1894; Kenyon, Melanges Weil, p. 243 (1898).

• — two columns of a private oration. Second century.
Egypt Exploration Fund. Hogarth and Grenfell, E. E. F.
Archaeological Beport, 1895-6, p. 16.

— fragments. In Paris (?). Late first or second century.
Egger, Mem. de I'Acad. des Inscr. xxvi (1870), with facs.

Pherecydes, n£i/Te/*vxos : fragment. Third century. Bodl.
MS. Gr. class, f. 48 (P). Grenfell and Hunt, G. P. ii. 11,
with facs.

APPENDIX II 145

Philo, Tts o T&v Oeiuiv KXrjpov6fji.o^ and Trepl yevicrem^ ''AyScX : in book

form. Sixth century (? third). Grizeh Museum. Ed.
ScheU, Mem. de la Mission Arch. Frangaise au Caire, tom.
9 (1893), with specimen facs.
Philodemus, various works among Herculaneum papyri. Cf.
Scott, Fragmenta Herculanensia.

Philosophy : —

Anonymous ; fragment. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus.
Pap. Doxoii. Grenfell and Hunt, G-. P. ii. 7 a.

— five small fragments. Third century b. c. Bodl. MS.
Gr. class, e. 63 (P). lb. 7 6.

— fragment. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. dxci 6.
Mahaffy, P. P. ii. 49 e.

— several rolls among Herculaneum papyri. First cen-
tury B. c. Cf. Scott, Fragmenta Herculanensia.

— several fragments of a treatise, apparently philosophical,
on verso of land-register. Second century. Brit. Mus.
Pap. Dccxxxiv.

— life of the philosopher Secundus. Second century (?). At
St. Petersburg. Tischendorf, Notitia Editionis Codicis
Sinaitici, p. 69 (i860).

— fragment on ethics. Second or third century. Brit.
Mus. Pap. CLXXxiv. Cat. of Additions, 1894.

— considerable fragments on ethics. Third century (?).
Brit. Mus. Pap. colxxv. Ibid.

— (? Aristotle), fragment on aesthetics. Eainer Coll. Men-
tioned in Phil. Ameig. xiv. 414; cf. Gomperz, Mitth.
i, 84 (1887).

Plato : —

Gorgias, parts of pp. 504 B-E, 505 A, in book form. Third

century. Eainer Coll. Wessely, Jlf«m. ii. 76 (1887).

Laches, small fragments of pp. 1 8 1 B-i 8 2 A. Second century.

Brit. Mus. Pap. clxxxvii verso. Cat. of Additions, 1894.

— pp. 190 B-192 A, with lacunas. Third century b. c.
Bodl. MS. Gr. class, d. 22, 23 (P). Mahaffy, P. P. ii. 50,
with facs.

L

146 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Plato {continued) : —

Laws, ix. pp. 862-3. Third century (before a. d. 295).

Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 23, with facs.
Phaedo, pp. 67 E-69 A, 79 C-81 D, 82 A-84 B, with

lacunas. Third century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. cccclxxxviii.

Mahaffy, P. P. i. 5-8, with facs.
B&public, X. pp. 607-8. Third century. Grenfell and Hunt,

0. P. i. 24.

Political Treatise, fragment of letter to a king of Macedon
against the Thebans. Second or third century. Grenfell
and Hunt, 0. P. i. 13.

Posidippus, two epigrams. Before b. c. i6i. Pap. Didot.
Weil, Monuments Grecs, with facs.

Romance : —

Anonymous, on adventures of Heracles ; fragments. Third
century b. c. Brit. Mus. Pap. dxcii. Mahaffy, P. P. ii. 49/.

— on adventures of Ninus ; fragments. Circ. b. c. 50-A. d. 50.
Berl. Pap. 6926. Wiloken, Hermes, xxviii. 161 (1893).

— on Metiochus and Parthenope ; fragment. Second cen-
tury. Berl. Pap. 7927. Krebs, Hermes, xxx. 144 (1895).

— with narrative of shipwreck ; fragment, on verso of
accounts. First-second century. In Dublin (?). Mahaffy,
Rendiconti della B. Accad. dei Lincei, 1897, with facs.

— considerable fragments. Second century. Brit. Mus. Pap.
ccLxxiv. Cat. of Additions, 1894.

Sappho (?; ; five fragmentary stanzas. Third century. Ee-
stored by Blass, ap. Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 7, with
facs.

Scazon Iambics, anonymous ; fragment. Third century (?).
Brit. Mus. Pap. clv verso. Cat. of Additions, 1894.

Science : —

Anonymous, on optics. Louvre Pap. 7733. Wessely, Wien.
Stud. xiii. 312 (1891).

APPENDIX II 147

Science {continued) : —

Anonymous, chemical excerpts. Third-fourth century.
Leyden Pap. x. Leemans, Papyri Graeci Lugduni-Batmi,
ii. 199 (1885).

— on mathematics. Seventh century (?). Gizeh Museum.
Ed. Baillet, in Mem. de la Miss. Arch. Fr. au Caire, tom.
9 (1892), vpith facs.

— on astronomy ; fragment. Eainer Pap. Mentioned in
Phil. Anmg. xiv. 477 (1884).

Sophocles, Oed. Tyr. 375-385, 429-441, in book form. Fifth
century (?). Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P. i. 22.

Theology : —

Anonymous ; fragment, sixteen lines. Sixth-seventh een
tury. Brit. Mus. Pap. cxiii. 12 a. Kenyon, Gat. of Papyri,
i. 224, with facs. (1893).

— fragment, thirty-two lines. Sixth-seventh century. Brit.
Mus. Pap. cxiii. 12 6. lb. p. 225, with facs.

— fragments, forty-six lines. Sixth-seventh century. Brit.
Mus. Pap. CXIII. 12 c. 76. p. 226, with facs.

— fragment, twenty-six lines. Sixth-seventh century.
Brit. Mus. Pap. CXIII. 13 a. Tib. p. 2 2 7, with facs.

— fragment. Sixth or seventh century. Brit. Mus. Pap.
ccocLxii. Unpublished.

— fragment. Sixth or seventh century. Brit. Mus. Pap.
ccccLxiv. Unpublished.

— fragment. Berl. Pap. Blass, Zeitschr. f. ag. Sprache,
1881,

— fragment, on verso of papyrus. Fourth century. Gren-
feU and Hunt, 0. P. i. 4-

Thucydides : —

ii. 7, 8. Second or third century. Grenfell and Hunt, 0. P.

i. 17.
iv. 36-41. First- second century. Hunt, E. E. F. Archaeo-
logical Report, 1896-7, p. 13, and 0. P. i. 16, with partial
facs.

L %

T48 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

Travels ; fragment of a description of Athens . Second century .
Petrie, Hawara, p. 28 (1889); cf. Wilcken, Berl. Phil.
WocJienschrift, Dec. 7, 1889.

Tryphon, Ti-xy-q ypafifLaTiKri, imperfect, in book form. Early
fourth century. Brit. Mus. Pap. cxxvi verso. Kenyon,
Class. Texts, with specimen facs.

Xenophon : —

Cyropaedia, v. 2. 3-3. 26, imperfect. Second century. Eaitier
Coll. Wessely, Mitth. vi. i (1897).

Hellenica, i. 2. 2-5. 8, imperfect. Third century. Eainer
Coll. Wessely, ib. vi. 17.

— ui. I, parts of three columns. Second century (?).
Grenfell and Hunt, O.P.i. 28.

Memorabilia, i. 3. 15, 4. 1-3. Third-fourth century.
Brit. Mus. Pap. dcxcv h. Grenfell and Hunt, G. P. ii. 13.

APPENDIX III

THE PEINCIPAL PUBLICATIONS OP NON-LITEBARY PAPYKI

(Arranged chronologically under the respective countries.
Isolated publications in periodicals are not included ; they
will mostly be found in Bermes, Phitdogus, and the Seme de
Philologie.)

I. Austria.

1. Pettretini (G-.), Papiri greco-egwi ed altri greet monumenti

dell' I. B. Museo di Corte {Vienna., 1826), with three plates.

2. Peyeon (A.), Papiri greco-egm di Zoide deW I. B. Museo

di Vienna, with two plates (Turin, 1828) ; a revision
of some of Pettretini's texts.

3. Wessely (K.), articles in Wiener Studien, iii-v, vii, xi

(Vienna, 1 881-1889).

4. Wessely (K.), articles in MittJieilungen aus der Sammlung

der Papyrus Erehersog Bainer (Vienna, 1887-1897).

5. Wessely (K.), Papyrus Ereherzog Bainer: Filhrer durch die

AussteUung (Vienna, 1894) ; edited by J. Karabacek, the
Greek section by Wessely, with nine facsimiles of Greek
papyri.

6. Wessely (K.), Corpus Papyrorum Baineri, voL i. Griechische

Texte (Vienna, 1895).

II. Feance.

7. Beunet de Peesle (W.), Notices et Textes des Papyrus Grecs

du Musee de Louvre et de la BiUiotheque Imperiale (in
Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits de la BiUiotheque Imperiale
et autres BiUiotheques, vol. xviii), with atlas of fifty-two
plates (1865).

I50 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

8. Wessely (K.), Lettres a M. Eevillout (in Bevue Egyptologique,

1884).

9. Wessely (K.), article in Wiener Studien, viii (i886).

10. Wessely (K.), GriecMscJie Zauberpapyrus von Paris und

London {Benkschriften der Jcais. Alcademie der Wissen-
schaften, Vienna, 1888).

1 1 . Wessely (K.), Die Pariser Papyri des Fimdes von El-Faijum

{ib. 1889).

12. Wessely (K.), Zu den griechischen Papyri des Lowvre vnd

der BibliotMque Nationale (in Jahresbericht des Jc. Jc.
Staatsgymnasiums Hernals, two parts, Vienna, 1889,
1890).

13. WiTKowsKi (S.)> Prodromus grammaticae papyrorum Grae-

carum aetatis Lagidarum (Cracow, 1897) > includes
revision of no. 7.

III. Geeat Britain and Ieeland.

14. FoESHALL (J.), GreeJi Papyri in the British Museum (London,

1839)-

15. Peyeon (B.), Papiri Greci del Museo Britamnico di Londra

e della Bihliotheca Vaticama {Tuvin, 1841); Forshall's texts
re-edited with commentary.

16. Wessely (K.), articles in Wiener Studien, viii, ix, xii

(Vienna, 1886, 1887, 1890).

17. Wessely (K.), Griechische Zauherpapyrus von Paris wnd

London {Benkschriften der k. Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Vienna, 1888) ; = no. 10 above.

18. Wessely (K.), Neue Griechische Zauberpapyri {ib. 1893).

19. Mahaefy (J. p.), The Flinders Petrie Papyri; Part I, with

thirty plates (Dublin, 1891); Part II, with eighteen
plates (Dublin, 1893) ; appendix, with three plates
(Dublin, 1894).

20. Ken YON (F. G.), Greek Papyri in the British Museum,

Catalogue with Texts; vol. i, with atlas of 150 plates
(London, 1893) ; vol. ii, with atlas of 123 plates (London,

APPENDIX III 151

21. Kenyon (F. G.), Catalogue of Additions to the Department of

Manuscripts in the British Museum, 1888-1893, pp.
390-450 (descriptions of papyri cxxi-ccoclviii in the
British Museum).

22. Geenpell (B. p.), Greeh Papyri from ApoUonopolis {Journal

of Philology, 1894).

23. Gbenfell (B. p.) and Mahafey (J. P.), Revenue Laws of

Ptolemy Philadelphus, with thirteen plates (Oxford, 1896).

24. Geeneell (B. p.), An Alexandriam, Erotic Fragment and

other GreeJc Papyri (Greek Papjrri I), with one plate
(Oxford, 1896).

25. Grenfell (B. P.) and Hunt (A. S), New Classical Fragments

and other Greek and Latin Papyri (Greek Papyri II),
with five plates (Oxford, 1897).

26. Geenfell (B. p.) and Hunt (A. S.), The Oxyrhynchus

Papyri, Part I, with eight plates (Egypt Exploration
Fund, London, 1898).

IV. Geemany.

2 7 . BoEOKH (A.), Frkldrwng einer agyptischen Urkunde auf Papyrus
(Abhandlungcn der Berl. Alcademie, Berlin, 1821).

28. Leteonne (J. A.), Catalogue des antiquites decouvertes en

EgypteparM. Passalacqua, with a facsimile (Paris, 1826).

29. Schmidt (W. A.), Die griechischen Papyrusurhumden der

JconiglicJien Bibliothek zu Berlin, with two facsimiles
(BerHn, 1842).

30. Paethey (G. F. C), Zauberpapyri {Alhandlungen der Mnigl.

Alcademie 0U Berlin, 1865).

31. Paethey (G. F. C), Die griechische Papyrusfragmente der

Leipsiger UniversitdtsUUiotheh {Sitzwngsherichtc der hmigl.
AMdemie zu Berlin, 1865).

32. Wessely (K.), Die griechischen Papyri Sachsens {Berichte der

Mnigl. Sachs. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 1885).

33. Magieus (K.) and WiissELY (K.), Griechische Papyri im

agyptischen Museum in Berlin (in Wiener Siudien, Vienna,
1886).

152 PALAEOGRAPHY OF GAEEK PAPYRI

34. WiLCKEN (U.), ArsinoitischeSteuerprofessionenundverwandte

UrJcimden, with four plates {Sitzungsberidlite der Mnigl.
AJcademie ^u Berlin, 1883).

35. WiLCKEN (U.), Actenstuche aus der Tioniglichen Bank zu Theben

in den Museen von Berlin, London, Paris {Abhandlungen
der Mnigl. AJcademie zu Berlin, 1886).

36. WiLCKEN (U.), articles in Hermes, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii,

xxvii, xxviii, xxLx, xxx (1884-1895), and Philologus, liii
(1894).

37. WiLCKEN (U.), Tafelm, zur dlteren griecJiischen Paldographie

(Leipzig and Berlin, 1891) ; twenty plates.

38. WiLCKEN (U.), Keebs (F.), and Viekeck (P.), Griechisclie

Urlcwnden aus den Museen in Berlin, vol. i, with three
facsimiles (1892-1895), vol. ii, with facs. of Latin papyrus
(189 5- 1898), vol. iii in progress.

V. Holland.

39. Eetjvens (C. J. C), Lettres a M. Letronne sur les Papyrus

lilimgues et grecs . . . du Musee d'Antiquites de I'Universite
de Leide (Leyden, 1830).

40. Leemans (0.), Pwpyri Graeci Musei Antiguarii PuUici

Lugduni-Batavi, vol. i, with six plates (1843); vol. ii,
with four plates (1885).

VI. Italy.

41. ScHow (N.), Charta papyraeea graece scrijpta Musei Borgiani

Velitris, with six plates (Eome, 1788).

42. Fueia (F. del), HlMstramone di un papiro Greco, che si

conserve presso il ch. sig. Imgi Lambruschini (in Furia's
Gollezione, vol. 17, Florence, 181 3).

43. Peyeon (A.), Papyri Graeci Regii Taurimnsis Musei Aegyptii,

with six plates (Turin, 1826).

44. Mai (A.), Auctores Classici, vol. iv. 445, v. 352, 356, 601,

602, 603 (Eome, 1831, 1832) ; texts of six papyri in the
Vatican.

APPENDIX III 153

45. Peyron (B.), Papiri Greci .... della Bibliotlieca Yaticana

(Turin, 1841); = no. 15 above. The Vatican papyri are
four of those given by Mai, with commentary.

VII. SWITZEBLAND.

46. Nicole (J.), articles in Bevvs de Philologie, xvii, xx (1893,

iSg6), Heme ArcMologique, xxiv, xxv (1893, 1894), Bevue
des JEtudes Grecgues, 1895.

47. Nicole (J.), Les Papyrus de Geneve, vol. i. fasc. i (1896).

APPENDIX IV

ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS

In the following list, A =the Brit. Mus. papyrus of Aristotle's 'ASi^vaiaiv

TloKiTeia,
H = Herculaneum Papyrus 157-152.
M = Medical Papyrus in the British Museum.

Tables of abbreviations and symbols used in non-literary papyri will
be found in the indices to the British Miiseum Catalogue of Papyri,
Grenfell's Oreek Papyri, vols, i and ii, and the Griechische Urkunden
of the Berlin Museum. All except those which are the caprices of an
individual, or as to which some doubt attaches, are included in the
list given below. In late theological papyri the familiar abbreviations
9s, Ks, ai/os K.T.X. are found, as in contemporary vellum MSS.

SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS USED IN
PAPYRI.

(a) IN LITERARY PAPYRI.

i = at (as part of a word)

(A).
(/^ = aiTios, ahCa, k.t.\. (M).
a =: &va (A).
^ = avTos and cases (A and

non-lit.).
y' = ydp (A, M).

y = y»p (H).

r* = ylverai k.t.X. (M).

6' =8€'(A).

8' = hid (A).

8" = bvvajxLs and cases (M).

\ = ehat. (A, H, M).

^ = daiv (A, M).
/ = ian (A, H, M).
e' = dai (A).

K = KOI (A).
K = Kal (H).
K = KOTci (M).

K = Kard (A).

^ = \o'yos(M,magicalpapp.).

Ij! = ixev (A, M).

jx = \xeTd (A).

N = vov (M).

I>J = KTJS (M).

IV = vmv (M).

APPENDIX IV

155

0' = ovv (A).

T

= Trjz; (A).

5 = ovT(o (M).

5

r

= rr,, (A).

^^ = ^apk (A, M).

f

= TpoTTos and cases (H).

it' = Trep or wept (A).

r

= rrnz^ (A, M).

7r' = Trpo's (M).

T

= TWV (H).

U = TTotjyriJs (Harris Homer).

i)

= v-nApx^i K.T.k. (M).

ffl = TTporepop (M).

u'

= vTiep (A).

rfl = irpo's (H, Brit. Mus.

i;^

= ^TTO' (A).

Pap. COLTI verso).

^

= (l>-r\(TiV, K.T.\. (M).

a-' = ovv (A).

)^

= xpovos (A, H).

(&) IN NON-LITEEAEY PAPYEI.

rf

= aiTO.

= ir^x''^'

-«

= apovpa (rare).

U = ■aoi-qp.a (magical papp.).

h

= apovpa (common).

P — ■npayp.a (magical papp.).

<

= apTa^T} (rare).

C\ = IToXlS.

^

= apTdp-r] (rare).

t = ■uvpov, or loosely irvpov

= apTd^t) (common).

dpTajSri.

5

= avTos and cases.

C = aekrivT} and cases

^

= belva (in magical papp.).

(magical papp.).

h

= bpaxm (Ptolemaic).

ii = (TKrJTTTpov (magical

<

= 6(0ax(X7j (Roman).

papp.).

/

= bpaxp-ri (Roman, less

A = TaXavTOv.

common).

^ — virep (By?ia,Titine).

^

= bpaxM (Roman).

^L = )(«A.K0C.

L

= eroy and cases.

;^ = xpte, K.T.X. (magical

6

= ■qkios and cases (magical

papp.).

papp.).

— =1 obol.

5

= KaC (l).

= = a obols.

s

= Kal.

r = 3 obols.

V

= KepaTLOv.

F = 4 obols.

t

= /^erpjjTTjy.

F = 5 obols.

D

H, or Dp-a = ovop.a

X° = 2 chalchi.

(magical papp.).

0' = 4 chalchi or ^ obol.

E!

Q El , □ D , or n ra = ovo-

o'x° = 6 chalchi.

nara (magical papp.).

q =90.

156

PALAEOGRAPHY OF GREEK PAPYRI

9

= 90.

^

= 900

a

= !^

3

9.

- f •

L

= 1.

d

-il

= i

= yiverai, or total.
= yivSTai, or total.
= sign of subtraction.
1 = remainder.

remainder [■wepUcrri).

n

' A combination of the signs for \ and \.

' The explanation of this sign is given by Brit. Mus. Pap. norv ; it is
the letter A (=4) written like o (as often in numerals, e. g. ^6 constantly =
^^), and with a stroke above it to mark that it is a fraction {6, hence d). AS
of the form d does not appear till the fourth century.

INDEX

(Figures in heavy type indicate that the principal description of the
MS. in question is to be found on the page so indicated.)

A, importance of, as a, test letter,

73-
Abbreviations, 32.
Abinnaeus, papyri of, 7, 47.
Accentuation, 28.
Alcman, Louvre fragment of, 5, 28,

32, 82.
Alexandrine MS. of the Bible, 121.
Apollonius, fragment of Homeric

Lexicon, 87.
Arden (J.), papyrus of Hyperides

discovered by, 5.
Aristarchean marks, 31, 81.
Aristotle, 'AOrjvaioiv XIoAiTSia, papyrus

of, 6, 17, 21, 22, 32, 44, 56, 91.
Arainoe, great find of papyri at, 6.
Ai-temisia, Curse of, 28, 57.
Ayer mathematical papyrus, 100.

Babington (Churchill), 85, 103.

Bacohylides, papyrus of, 7, 18, 27,
28, 29, 30, 31, 75.

Bankes (W. J.), papyrus of Homer
discovered by, 5 ; and see s.v.
Homer.

Bernard (J. H.), 118.

Bible, earliest extant papyrus frag-
ments of, 109 ; early vellum uncial
MSS. of, 120.

Birt (T.), on manufacture of
papyrus, 15.

Blass (F.), 3, 57, 77, 86, 95, 107.

Borchardt (L.), on length of papyrus

rolls, 18.
Borgia (Cardinal Stefano), 4.
Breathings, 30.

British Museum Papyri, not indexed
under authors' names (mostly non-
literary) :
Pap. xxiv, 39.
XLiv, ib.
XL VI, 116.
Lxxvil, 52.
xcviii recto, 103.
ox, 104.

OXIX, 2 2.
CXXI, 20, 110.

oxxxvii, 20.
cxLi, 88, loi.

CXLIII, 43.
OLXXVII, 16.
CLXXXVII, 90, 102.

COVIIIC, 87.

cox, 51.

ccLvn-ccLix, 18, 86.
coLX, 2 2, 43, 86.

COLXVl, 20.
CCLXVIII, 18.
COLXXVI, 43.

cooxxn, 46.
oooxxxn, 45.

OCOLI, 46.
CCOLIV, 16, 82.
DOXXIII, 2 2, 53.
DCLXXV, 2 2.

158

INDEX

Codices, papyrus, 24.

Corrections, how indicated in papyri,

31-
Cyril, Dublin papyrus of, 118.

Dates, how expressed in papyri, 53.
Demosthenes, llpoolf^ia 5Tjfj.7]yopucd,

among Oxyrhynchus papyri, 76.
Demosthenes, third Epistle, papyrus

of, 16, 77.
Demosthenes, De Falsa Legatione,

vellum fragment of, 113.
Diaeresis, marks of, 30.
Dialectical treatise, in Louvre, 65.
Dioscorides, Vienna MS. of, 121.
Diphthongs, accentuation of, 29.
Division of words at end of line, 31.

Egyptian and extra-Egyptian writing,
70.

Erotic Fragment, 28, 68.

Eta, peculiar form of, 44.

Eudoxus, astronomical treatise de-
rived from, in Louvre, 56.

Euripides, Antiope, papyrus of, 6,
19, 27, 29, 61.

Euripides, Orestes, Geneva fragment
of, 100.

Ezekiel, Bodleian fi-figment of, 107.

Fayyum, discoveries of papyri in, 4,
5, 6, 49.

Festal Letter, fragment of, 118.

Forshall (J.), editor of British Mu-
seum papyri, 5.

Gardthausen (V.), treatment of papyri
in his GriecMsche Paldographie,

', 15-
Goodspeed (E. J.), 100.
Grenfell (B. P.), 7, 36, 40, 41, 47, 59,

60, 68, 76, 87, 91, 97, 106, 107,

118.

Harris (A. C), papyrus of Hyperides
discovered by, 5 ; papyri of Homer,
«&. ; and see s.v. Homer.

Heracles, papyrus fragment of adven-
tures of, 60.
Heiculaneum, papyrus rolls of, 3, 32,

70.
Hermas, fragment of, at Berlin, 106.
Hermopolis, papyri discovered at, 6.
Herodas, Mimes, papyrus of, 6, 16,

17, 18, 22, 27, 29, 31, 94.
Herodotus, on use of skins as writing

material, 14,
Hesiod, British Museum fragment of,

117.
Hogarth (D. G.), 7, 40, 41.
Homer, lUad II, Oxford papyrus of,

31, 101.
Homer, Iliad II-IV, papyrus of (B.

M. Pap. oxxvi), 25, 27, 29, 105.
Homer, Iliad III, IV, papyrus of

(B. M. Pap. oxxxvi), 96.
Homer, Iliad XI, Geneva fragment

of, 68.
Homer, Iliad XIII, XIV, papyrus

of (B. M. Pap. Dcoxxxii), 97.
Homer, Iliad XVIII, papyrus of

(Harris Homer, B. M. Pap. ovil),

22, 23, 28, 29, 30, 84.
Homer, Iliad XXIII, XXIV, papy-
rus of (B. M. Pap. cxxviii), 17, 18,

21, 28, 29, 31, 81.
Homer, Iliad XXIV, papyrus of

(Bankes Homer, B. M. Pap. cxiv) ,

28, 29, 30, 73, 98.
Homer, /Kad, fragments of, in Louvre,

6, 80-
Homer, Iliad, Milan MS. of, on vel-
lum, 121.
Homer, Odyssey III, British Museum

papyrus of, 16, 18, 21, 28, 29, 30,

31, 83.
Hunt (A. S.), 7, 76, 9T.
Hyperides, In Athenogenem, Louvre

papyrus of, 6, 18, 21, 27, 64, 65, 67.
Hyperides, In Demosthenem, Pro

Zycopkrone, and Pro Huxenippo,

papyrus of, 5, 17, 18, 21, 22, 27,

31.85.
Hyperides, Funeral Oration, papyrus

of, S, 103.

INDEX

159

Hyperides, In Philippidem, papyrus

non-literary, 9 ; value of the latter

of, 6, 16, 18, 21, 22, 27, 77.

for palaeography, 12.

Papyrus as writing material, early

Indiction-period, dating by, 54.

use of, 14; preparation for use.

Inscriptions, beaming of, upon palaeo-

15; dimensions of sheets, 16 ff . ;

graphy, 9.

recto and terso, 19 ; width of

Isaiah, fragment of, at Vienna, 109.

columns, 21 ; use of rollers, 23; its

Isoorates, De Pace, papyrus of, 18,

use in book form, 24.

21, 22, 95.

napaypaipos, 27.

Isocrates, In Nicoclem, Marseilles

Periods of papyrus-palaeography, 34.

papyrus of, 27, 108.

Peter, Gospel and Kevelation of.

vellum MS. of, 119.

Kepara, 23.

Petrie (W. M. F.), papyri discovered

KoWrj/xa, 16.

by, 6, 36, 36, 58, loi.

Peyron (A.), editor of Turin papyri, 5.

*oii'(5a.7)j, 24.

Leemans (C), editor of Leyden

Pherecydes, fragment of, 107.

papyri, 5.

Philodemus, papyri of, at Hercu-

Zogia lesu, papyrus of, 7.

laneum, 71.

Philyra, 15.

Magical papyrus at Paris, 115.

Plato, Laches, papyrus of, 63.

Mahaffy (J. P.), 35, 60, 62, 68.

Plato, Laws, Oxyrhynohus fragment

Mariette (F. A. F.), papyrus of Aloman

of, 109.

discovered by, 5.

Plato, Phaedo, papyrus of, 6, 19, 27,

Mattliew, St., Oxyrhynohus fragment

28, 29, 61.

of, 109.

Pliny, on the preparation of papyrus,

Medical papyrus in British Museum,

IS, 16, 17.

20, 32, 56.

Prisse Papyrus, 14.

Menander, Teapyds, papyrus of, 7, 25.

Psalter, fragment of (B. M. Pap.

Minuscule hand on veUum, origin

ccxix), 109.

of, 51, 124.

Psalter, portion of (B. M. Pap.

Montfauoon (B. de), 3.

XXXVJI), 116.

Punctuation, 27.

New Testament, the earliest MSS.

of, how written, 93.

Hainer collection of papyri, 47.

Nicholson (E. W. B.), Bodley's

Recto and Verso, rule of, 19.

Librarian, 87.

Kevenue Papyrus, 17, 20, 35.

Nicole (J.), 7, 68, 100.

Hollers, use of, 23.

'OpupaUs, 23.

Sappho, Oxyrhynohus fragment of,

Oxyrhynohus, papyri found at, 7, 47,

109.

49. 76. 77. 91. i°o> i°3. 108.

Scapns, 18.

Schow (N.), 4.

Palaeogr.nphy, uncertainty of, 79.

Scott (W.), edition of Heroulanean

Papyri, history of discoveries of, 3 ;

papyri, 71, 74-

chronological period covered by, 7 ;

ScAi's, 21.

distinction between literary and

Separation of words, 26.

i6o

INDEX

Serapeum at Memphis, papyri of, 4,

38-
'SiXhiPos, 22.

Sinaitio MS. of the Bible, 120.
Sloping hand, use of in third century,

105.
Socnopaei Nesus, great find of papyri

at, 6.
Stobart (H.), papyrus of Hyperides

discovered by, 6.

Tachygraphy, 33.

Thompson (Sir E. Maunde), 57, 62,
84, 85, 98, loi ; his Handbook of
Greek mid Latin Palaeography, 3,

15. 24. 36. 74. "S-

Titles, 22.

Tryphon, papyrus of treatise attri-
buted to, 27, 106.

Uncial and cursive writing, dis-
tinction between, with regard to
papyri, 10.

Vatican MS. of the Bible, 120.
Vellum, earliest use of, 112; papyrus

superseded by it, 115; results of

the change, 122.

Wattenbach (W.), 3, 31.

Wessely (K.), 57.

Wilcken (U.), 19, 106, 124; his

Tafeln zttr alteren grieohischen

FaldograpMe, 46, 47.
Writing, early use of, 8.

3, importance of, as a test letter, 73.

Zechariah, papyrus of, 25, 118.

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